Lithium and hematopoiesis: effective experimental use of lithium as an agent to improve bone marrow transplantation

Bone marrow transplantation (BMT) has become a widely used procedure in the treatment of numerous hematological and non-hematological clinical disorders. The preparative regimen used for marrow recipients is not without risk as the immunodeficient recipient is susceptible to life-threatening infections due to the inability of the marrow to engraft properly. The monovalent cation lithium has been demonstrated to influence regenerating hematopoiesis following the use of several agents known to suppress hematopoiesis. The following report summarizes our studies which have been designed to determine the rate of hematopoietic reconstitution in lethally irradiated mice that were transplanted with bone marrow cells, harvested from either syngeneic or allogeneic donor animals, treated with lithium or phosphate buffered saline (PBS). Transplanted recipients receiving marrow cells from lithium treated donors were evaluated for their survival, peripheral blood indices and several classes of hematopoietic progenitors (granulocyte, erythroid, and megakaryocyte). Transplanted animals that received marrow cells from either syngeneic or allogeneic donors treated with lithium demonstrated greater survival, increased recovery of peripheral indices and hematopoietic progenitors compared to PBS-treated controls. These results indicate that the use of lithium to treat the donor may be an effective procedure to enhance hematopoietic recovery and engraftment in the transplanted recipient. Because of its wide-ranging effects, the use of lithium as a single agent, may be more efficacious than administering several hematopoietic growth factors in order to achieve a similar response.