Researchers identify cells that predict onset of graft-versus-host disease in men receiving bone marrow transplants from female donors
Stanford University School of Medicine investigators have identified a clutch of cells that — if seen in a male patient’s blood after receiving a brand-new immune system in the form of a bone-marrow transplant from a female donor — herald the onset of chronic graft-versus-host disease, or cGVHD. In this devastating syndrome, the patient’s tissues come under a vicious and enduring assault by the transplanted cells.
“The overwhelming majority of patients who have these cells in their blood either have or will develop cGVHD within one to three months,” said David Miklos, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and senior author of the new study, which will be published online Feb. 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Until now there have been no good predictive indicators for the onset of cGVHD, he said.
Funding: The study, whose first author is research scientist Bita Sahaf, PhD, was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (HL084318 and CA049605). Other Stanford co-authors were genetics professor Leonore Herzenberg, DSc; assistant professor of medicine Sally Arai, MD; and research associate Yang Yang, PhD.
More information for the Stanford Department of Medicine’s Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation Program, which also supported this work, is available at http://bmt.stanford.edu/