Hematopoietic cell transplantation: five decades of progress

Frédéric Baron1, Rainer Storb, Marie-Térèse Little

  • 1Transplantation Biology Program, Clinical Research Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109-1024, USA.

During the past 50 years, the role of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) has changed from a desperate therapeutic maneuver plagued by apparently insurmountable complications to a curative treatment modality for thousands of patients with hematologic diseases. Now, cure rates following human leukocyte antigen (HLA) allogeneic HCT with matched siblings exceed 85% for some otherwise lethal diseases, such as chronic myeloid leukemia, aplastic anemia, or thalassemia. In addition, the recent development of non-myeloablative conditioning and stem cell transplantation has opened the way to include elderly patients with a wide variety of hematologic malignancies. Further progress in adoptive transfer of T cell populations with relative tumor specificity would make the transplant procedure more effective and would extend the use of allogeneic HCT for treatment of non-hematopoietic malignancies.

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