Sunita Nathan, Md - Rush university medical center

I am a part of the bone marrow transplant team here at Rush, and I primarily work with patients who have lymphoma and who would eventually need a transplant. My goal as a part of the transplant team is to essentially simplify this process, is to help patients understand better what it is exactly that they are going through so that they can eventually get better and get back to their life. A few years ago, the thought was that one could safely get through a donor-type transplant only if they had a 10-out-of-10 match, a perfectly matched sibling donor. Today, however, we can say that more than 99 percent of the patients can have a donor, will have a donor, because we can safely take them through the haploidentical transplant, where a parent or a child or a half-matched sibling can be a suitable donor.