Immunotherapeutic approaches to improve graft-versus-tumor effect and reduce graft-versus-host disease

Panagiotis Tsirigotis1, Reuven Or, Igor B Resnick

  • 1Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation & Cancer Immunotherapy, Hadassah - Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel. panagtsirigotis@gmail.com

Immunotherapy
|April 20, 2012
PubMed

The therapeutic efficacy of allogeneic stem cell transplantation is mainly based on the alloreactive immune response of the graft against the host. However, the graft-versus-host process can be viewed as a double-edged sword since it is responsible for both the beneficial graft-versus-tumor effect and the deleterious graft-versus-host disease. During the last two decades, intensive research has been focused on the development of novel immunotherapeutic methods aimed to dissociate graft-versus-host disease from graft-versus-tumor effect. A brief description of these efforts is discussed in this review.

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