A second patient with HIV has been cured with a stem cell transplant at Charité – Berlin University Medicine. In 2008, the “Berlin Patient” became the first person in the world to be cured of HIV, by such a transplant. In both cases the patients were being treated for blood…

Many patients who receive hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) for blood cancer suffer from stress related to their treatments. Now, a new phone-based positive psychology program called Positive Affect for the Transplantation of Hematopoietic stem cells intervention (PATH), has shown that it can alleviate the stress these patients experience as…

New research led by investigators at Uppsala University in Sweden shows emerging evidence that autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (aHSCT) may be a suitable treatment for relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (MS). Relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) is characterized by distinct inflammatory episodes that result in varying degrees of disability. The symptoms will resolve…

Adjusting dosage of the pre-transplant drug anti-thymocyte globulin (ATG) to better take into account factors such as bodyweight, lymphocyte cell counts before the first dose, and the source of the stem cells being used for transplantation can improve outcomes for children undergoing stem cell transplants. The researchers, based at the…

New evidence suggests ganciclovir may alter stem cell transplant patients’ DNA, but that transplanted stem cells do not. That’s according to a study by Researchers in the Van Boxtel group at the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology. The researchers analyzed the DNA of blood cells in nine patients who…

BK virus (BKV)-specific T cells from healthy donors were safe and effective as an off-the-shelf therapy for BKV-associated hemorrhagic cystitis (BKV-HC), according to a Phase II trial led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.  BK virus-associated hemorrhagic cystitis is a painful complication and common after…

A research team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine has made a significant discovery that could enhance the effectiveness of stem-cell transplants, a critical treatment for patients with cancer, blood disorders, or autoimmune diseases. Published in Science, the study reveals a novel mechanism that may improve the mobilization of…

A new study from researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has uncovered critical insights into why aging is the most significant risk factor for cancer. The research, published in Science, details how the aging immune system contributes to tumor growth and offers potential new avenues for…

New research out of Dana-Farber, the Broad, and Harvard Medical School improves our ability to forecast the alloreactivity of hematopoietic cell transplants (HCTs), which could significantly improve patient outcomes in precision immuno-oncology and allogeneic HCT (allo-HCT) and lead to fewer post-transplant diseases. The cause of allo-HCT-related disease The leading cause…

In a significant advancement for glioblastoma treatment, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered that natural killer (NK) cells engineered to express interleukin-21 (IL-21) show powerful and sustained antitumor activity against glioblastoma stem cell-like cells (GSCs). Reporting in Cancer Cell, the scientists present the first…

There is a team readily available to report 24/7 to a facility at the University of Chicago Medical Center to quickly receive and process a deceased donor’s pancreas into isolated islets for infusion into a patient with type 1 diabetes. The results have been astounding. Some patients who underwent allogeneic…

Promising new data from a trial of Vertex’s early phase islet cell therapy VX-880 for type 1 diabetes (T1D) trial showed three patients, with 12 months of follow-up, reached insulin independence. All of the dozen patients in the trial showed improvement over all—they received the full dose of VX-880 and…

A novel technique could potentially eradicate the toxic conditioning process required to effectively transplant hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs), which play a crucial role in treating blood disorders like sickle cell disease and β-thalassemia. Researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) utilized CRISPR-Cas9 to…

Pluripotent stem cell (PSC) therapies have shown great promise across a number of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and cystic fibrosis, but have been plagued by them often leading to cancer after transplantation. Now, a team of researchers from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan have identified…

Gigi Chambers has had a lot to contend with as a patient—she’s beaten cancer twice, including stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and then twenty years later was diagnosed with heart failure and received a transplant. But nothing has been more dreadful and uncomfortable than the post-transplant heart biopsies checking for graft…