More Data on Age and Stem Cell Transplantation
Making therapies that can work in older patients despite their frailty and damage is an important part of progress in stem cell medicine of all sorts: "Age alone no longer should be considered a defining factor when determining whether an older patient with blood cancer is a candidate for stem cell transplantation. That's the conclusion of the first study summarizing long-term outcomes from a series of prospective clinical trials of patients age 60 and over ... the five-year rates of overall and disease-progression-free survival among mini-transplant patients were 35 percent and 32 percent, respectively. Patients in three age groups - 60 to 64, 65 to 69 and 70 to 75 - had comparable survival rates, which suggested that age played a limited role in how patients tolerate the mini-transplant. ... Conventional transplants, which are generally not perfomed on people over age 60 or others who are medically unfit, use high doses of total-body irradiation and potent chemotherapy to eliminate leukemic cells. The intense treatment destroys the blood and immune system and is fatal unless the patient is rescued by infusion of donor bone marrow or stem cells isolated from peripheral blood. The mini-transplant, in contrast, relies on the ability of donor immune cells to target and destroy the cancer - without the need for high-dose chemotherapy and radiation. Instead, low-dose radiation and chemotherapy is used to suppress the immune system rather than destroy it. This helps the body accept the donor stem cells, which then go to work to attack cancer cells - called the graft-vs.-leukemia effect - and rebuild the immune system."
Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/fhcr-anl102611.php