New research from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

New findings from a study led by Dr. Marco Mielcarek
and colleagues in the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center offer new hope for reducing the risk of graft-vs.-host disease, or GVHD, in patients who receive transplants of matched related and unrelated donor blood stem cells for leukemia and other high-risk blood cancers.
GVHD occurs when newly transplanted donor cells attack the organs of the transplant recipient, regarding them as foreign. It affects up to 80 percent of patients who receive donor stem cell transplants. Symptoms, including skin rashes, nausea, diarrhea, weight loss and liver problems, among others, may develop within a few months after transplant (known as acute GVHD) or much later, and symptoms sometimes last up to a lifetime (known as chronic GVHD), which can significantly reduce quality of life.
The study found that treating patients with an immune-suppressing drug called cyclophosphamide three and four days after transplantation, followed by another immunosuppressive drug called cyclosporine on day five, reduced the relative risk of chronic GVHD by more than half: from the expected 35 percent to 16 percent.
The researchers also found that this post-transplant treatment reduced the risk of severe acute GVHD from the expected 10 to 15 percent to zero.

The regimen used in the Hutch study had been adapted to blood stem cell transplantation from a regimen that had been introduced by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and had been shown to reduce chronic GVHD after bone marrow transplantation.