New Techniques May Help in Bone Marrow Transplants

New techniques may improve the chances of successful bone marrow transplants in cancer patients who do not have good tissue matches with donors. About 30,000 such transplants are performed in the United States each year. They are a potentially lifesaving treatment of last resort for some victims of leukemia and other types of cancer, but about 25% of patients cannot have transplants because doctors are unable to find a closely matched donor.

Doctors from the University of Perugia in Italy and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, report a potential way around this in a study in today’s New England Journal of Medicine. The method is based on giving patients much larger than usual doses of donated marrow. After 18 months, 12 of the 43 patients treated this way were free of disease. Doctors cautioned that the rebuilding of the patients’ immune systems was poor and infections were a common cause of death.

Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II