Doctors seem to have found a way to make bone-marrow transplants safer and more effective against blood cancers such as leukemia, an achievement that offers new hope for people over 50 in particular.
The advance by Stanford University doctors could make such transplants, which have improved cancer survival among children and young adults, more widely available to older people who typically don’t fare as well. It also brings the field closer to its Holy Grail: training a recipient’s body to accept tissue from a donor and live without heavy reliance on anti-rejection drugs.
The study is published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Ideally, a leukemia or lymphoma patient would be given radiation or chemotherapy to destroy cancerous bone marrow before receiving healthy marrow or stem cells from a donor. But many patients, especially older ones, die of infections before the new marrow takes hold. To avoid this, doctors usually destroy only part of the original marrow, and some cancerous cells can remain.
The researchers developed a way to condition the recipient to accept the new marrow and inactivate the parts of the patient’s immune system that would attack it.
