In patients who are initially treated with other therapies for acute leukemia and then relapse, bone marrow transplantation is usually the treatment with the best chance for cure. Though the cure rate is less than 50 percent, it has become the generally accepted form of therapy.
The transplantation can be either allogeneic or autologous in acute leukemia. But if autologous transplantation is the choice, there has to be a source of uncontaminated bone marrow cells for reinfusion after high-dose therapy. This is usually accomplished by trying to eliminate—purging —contaminating leukemia cells from bone marrow collected during a period of remission .
Chronic Leukemias Bone marrow transplantation has only recently been used in cases of chronic granulocytic leukemia, a disease that occurs in young adults and is always fatal with standard therapy. During the late 1970s and 1980s, quite a few patients with this cancer underwent allogeneic bone marrow transplantation and a promising number of them were cured. Allogeneic transplantation has now become the treatment of choice for patients of an appropriate age with chronic granulocytic leukemia and who have an HLA-matched brother or sister. Cure rates of over 50 percent have been reported.
Non-Hodgkin's Lymphomas and Hodgkin's Disease Lymphomas are among the tumors most responsive to chemotherapy and radiation. Hodgkin's disease was the first commonly occurring solid tumor shown to be curable with combination chemotherapy , and all types of lymphomas can be cured with radiation
