Hematopoietic progenitor cell transplantation in 2007: new challenges and new opportunities for the center for international blood and marrow transplant research.

摘要

This past year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal paper by Barnes and Loutit, which demonstrated for the first time in a mouse model the existence of a graft-versus-leukemia effect mediated by donor cells . The paper from Barnes and Loutit represented the first seed in the development of our field. This seed bore its first fruits almost 20 years later when Dr. Thomas reported the transplant outcomes of the first 100 patients treated in Seattle with high-dose chemoradiotherapy and allogeneic transplantation as treatment of refractory leukemia . The concepts of dose intensity as a strategy to overcome cancer cell resistance, hematopoietic progenitor cell rescue as a tool to deliver supralethal chemoradiotherapy, and finally the existence of an immune-mediated graft-versus-tumor effect still form the basis of our field today.