The feasibility of peripheral blood stem cell collection for autograft following failure in bone marrow aspiration

High doses of cytotoxic drugs may impair stem cell collection. Failure in stem cell collection by bone marrow aspiration can be rescued by harvesting Peripheral Blood Stem Cell (PBSC) after a combination of chemotherapy and hematopoietic growth factor. We, therefore, retrospectively evaluated the possibility of collecting PBSC after chemotherapy and/or G-CSF administration in 12 patients with insufficient Granulocyte-macrophage colony-forming unit (CFU-GM) counts after bone marrow aspiration (all patients had previously received heavy chemotherapy for hematologic malignancies); median collection of CFU-GM/kg count was 2,9 x 10(4)/kg (range 0,4 to 8 x 10(4)/kg) whereas the minimal count required for autografting is 10 x 10(4)/kg. Median collections of CFU-GM from PBSC were 5,8 x 10(4)/kg. While the CFU-GM collected in PBSC was higher than after bone marrow aspiration, only 5 patients had enough PBSC for autografting. In another case, addition of cells collected from both PBSC and bone marrow aspiration yielded a sufficient number of CFU-GM to allow autografting. Therefore in this selected and small group of patients, failure in bone marrow aspiration does not seem to be predictive of a low PBSC collection but a long therapy free interval and use of G-CSF alone for PBSC mobilization could constitute a valuable alternative. Three patients had a successful short term hematologic reconstitution out of the four patients having had an autograft.