VAL ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE Patients who receive blood stem cells from a donor run a risk of developing immediate life-threatening infections and, a month or so later, graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). But a report published in Science Translational Medicine today (May 18) shows that treating stem cell transplant patients with particular antibiotics might increase GVHD severity.
“The key message is that some antibiotics that we routinely use for transplant patients . . . can really amplify the principal nemesis, which is graft-versus-host disease,” said James Ferrara of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City who was not involved in the study. “This article starts to illuminate . . . which antibiotics are most harmful and why.”
If a person’s immune system is impaired because of, say, leukemia or other blood cancers, it’s possible they will require an infusion of donor blood stem cells—known as an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT). First, the patient’s own diseased immune cells are destroyed by chemotherapy or radiation. Then the donor cells are introduced. The resulting reduction in functional immune cells, even after transplant, leaves ...
