Division of Hematologic Malignancies &
Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation
BMT New Advancement & Outcomes at Jefferson
Overview
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Research
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New Advancements
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Donor Registry
The outcomes of three highly successful trials conducted by our Program during the past five years have greatly surpassed our original hopes and expectations. The transplant approach used in these trials was originally developed for patients lacking matched donors. The only option for these patients was to utilize a half-matched (haploidentical) donor. These trials utilize a unique “two-step” approach:
- Step one of the transplant is a lymphocyte (immune cell) infusion from the donor containing a fixed, optimized number of T-cells. After allowing those T-cells that can recognize the recipient to become activated for a few days, patients subsequently receive further chemotherapy in an effort to eliminate growing donor lymphocytes that are likely to cause graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) after transplant.
- Step two of the transplant takes place after the chemotherapy is metabolized (burned up), when donor stem cells are infused to restore blood counts.
 BMT Team with the survivors of the Two-step Haploidentical Transplantation Procedure |
Our team has extensive experience and expertise in using mismatched donors for BMT, having now performed more than 120 transplants using this new approach. The outcome of our half matched approach for patients transplanted in 1st or 2nd remission is illustrated in the figure below and now rivals the results seen with fully matched donors. We have applied similar approaches to most of our allogeneic (donor) transplants including our fully matched related and unrelated donor transplants and are also encouraged by our successes in these areas as well.
