Management strategies for poor peripheral blood stem cell mobilization

Peripheral blood stem cells (PBSC) have nearly replaced bone marrow (BM) as the preferred source of hematopoietic rescue for patients undergoing high-dose chemotherapy. However, some patients fail to mobilize sufficient numbers of PBSC into the peripheral blood thereby putting high-dose chemotherapy at risk. The present article reviews mobilization of PBSC with a special focus on poor mobilizers.Under steady-state conditions less than 0.05% of the white blood cells (WBC) are CD34+ cells. Chemotherapy results in a 5–15-fold increase of PBSC. Combining chemotherapy and growth factors increases CD34+ cells up to 6% of WBC. Several factors affect the mobilization of PBSC: age, gender, type of growth factor, dose of the growth factor and in the autologous setting patient’s diagnosis, chemotherapy regimen and number of previous chemotherapy cycles or radiation. Poor mobilizers are defined as patients with less than 10 CD34+ cells/μl in the peripheral blood during mobilization. Promising approaches for those patients rely on remobilization, use of high doses of granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF), or the combination of G-CSF and granulocyte macrophage (GM)-CSF, which successfully mobilized the majority of poor mobilizing patients. New agents such as long lasting variants of G-CSF and CXCR4 antagonists are at the horizon and studied in clinical trials as mobilizing agents. Muscle and bone pain are frequent adverse events in stem cell mobilization but are usually tolerated under the use of analgesics.Large volume apheresis (LVL) with a processed volume of more than 4-fold patient’s blood volume is an approach to increase the CD34+ yield in patients with low CD34+ pre-counts resulting in higher yields of CD34+ cells for transplantation. Processing of more blood in LVL is achieved by an increase of the blood flow rate and an altered anticoagulation regimen with the occurrence of more citrate reactions.