Like allogeneic donors, patients who donate their own peripheral blood for an autologous stem cell transplant, as well as identical twins making a syngeneic donation, receive injections of growth factor prior to collection by apheresis. This amplifies the number of blood stem cells in the bloodstream. Almost all autologous/syngeneic transplants are now taken from peripheral blood.
Of course, the patient will also receive high-dose chemotherapy before his self-donated stem cells are reinfused. Some clinical trials even repeat the procedure twice for these autologous transplants, so high-dose chemotherapy is followed by a self-donated transplant two times. This back-to-back clinical protocol is called a tandem transplant.
![Preparing Patients for Autologous/Syngeneic Transplants](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20081015124109im_/http://www.nci.nih.gov/images/Documents/84790913-8189-4760-83de-6fbad2a812ed/slide23.jpg)
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