ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY:
The host response to anthrax lethal toxin: unexpected observations
AUTHOR CONTACT:
Alice S. Prince
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York, USA
Phone: 212-305-4193
Fax: 212-305-2284
E-mail: asp7@columbia.edu
View the PDF of this commentary at: https://www.the-jci.org/press/19581.pdf
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Safely achieving tolerance to stem cell transplantation
Dale Greiner and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts have developed a protocol for achieving stem cell transplantation that is not limited by significant patient side-effects and may not necessarily require that donor blood, bone marrow or whole organs are a "match" with the recipient - characteristics that make these new procedures highly attractive for development and use in clinical human transplantation.
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are parent cells in the bone marrow that give rise to blood cells. Allogeneic stem cell transplantation has great potential in the treatment of malignancy, genetic disorders, and in solid organ transplantation.
However, the radiation or high doses of chemotherapy commonly used in the treatment of blood cancers to destroy abnormal HSCs--a process called myeloablation-- is very toxic.
Furthermore, even following this form of conditioning, many patients develop graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), where the host immune system launches an attack against the newly transplanted HSCs.
In order to avoid both lethal conditioning and GVHD, new HSC transplant strate
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Contact: Brooke Grindlinger
science_editor@the-jci.org
212-342-9006
Journal of Clinical Investigation
2-Sep-2003