By: Charlotte Schubert, Ph.D. – University of Miami Miller School of Medicine –
Blood cancer patients who may have previously struggled to find a donor for transplantation now have more options.
A new study shows that patients achieve good outcomes with an partial match drawn from the national public registry of donors when they are treated with the immune-suppressing drug cyclophosphamide. Survival rates at one year were on par with rates seen in other studies with fully matched donors.
“Outcomes were comparable to fully matched donors, which means your pool of potential donors is now huge,” said senior study author Antonio Jimenez Jimenez, M.D., associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “Not only can you now offer every patient a transplant, but you can also optimize other factors when looking for a donor.”
