Drug, Blood Cancer Risk Linked
From Times Staff and Wire reports
Treatment of heart transplant patients with a powerful immune suppressing drug appears to sharply increase their risk of a lethal form of blood cell cancer, a study concludes. Researchers found that 11% of patients at one hospital who were treated this way quickly developed lymphoma, and most of those people died.
The treatment is called OKT3, an antibody that attacks a variety of white blood cells that play a key role in making the body reject the transplanted organ. The new study shows that even if OKT3 prevents rejection--and this is in doubt--the benefit comes at a high price of cancer risk.
