Recent Advancements in Stem Cell Transplants

The use, practices, and adjuvant treatments of bone marrow and stem cell transplants has changed drastically in recent years. At the American Society of Hematology (ASH) 2023 Annual Meeting, Amer Assal, MD, hematologist/oncologist and associate professor of medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, discusses some of the most significant changes in the field.

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0:09 | There [have been] a lot of updates and advances recently, especially in recent times. They range from how to make [stem cell transplants] safer and different applications of stem cell transplant. I think the major advances in the field really go into how we treat and prevent graft vs host disease. So that's one of the main complications that we have in stem cell transplant, and it affects patients' quality of life and affects their survival after transplant, and then there's been increased adoption of use of what we call PTCy, so post-transplant cyclophosphamide. That's giving chemo after the stem cells are in which helps eliminate or modulate the T cells and their function after transplant. That's led to a good reduction in graft versus host disease.

0:54 | Another advance in the field is the use of JAK inhibitors to treat graft vs host disease. At this meeting, there [have] been some abstracts on how they could potentially be used in prevention, even though the main study with that was not a positive study. But JAK inhibitors have really been, after years of successful trials, JAK inhibitors have been the main drug that were [in] randomized studies [and] FDA-approved to treat graft vs host disease, steroid-refractory graft vs host disease.