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.