The clinical benefits of recombinant human granulocyte colony stimulating factor in the treatment of cancer patients.

Recombinant human granulocyte colony stimulating factor (rHuG-CSF) has been used for several years in clinical haematology and it is now routinely employed to prevent or treat chemotherapy-induced neutropenia. rHuG-CSF is also administered after autologous or allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT), since it can significantly shorten the duration of neutropenia. However, probably its main use at the moment is to facilitate the collection of peripheral blood stem cells (PBSC) from patients with lymphoma, myeloma and breast cancer. Within controlled trials, it is also used as an adjunct to immunosuppression for patients with aplastic anaemia. rHuG-CSF has a number of other potential uses such as increasing the numbers of progenitor cells for transplantation by in vivo and/or ex vivo amplification; treatment of non-neutropenic infections post transplant, and prophylaxis and treatment of cytomegalovirus infections. In the future, autologous stem cell transplants may be performed in the outpatient department thus expanding the use of PBSC transplantation to disease areas not previously considered suitable for such myelosuppressive treatment.