Rare marrow cells tackle deadly immune reaction

From Atlanta, at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology

Blood-making stem cells taken from a healthy person’s bone marrow can give patients a fighting chance against aggressive blood cancers, but the treatment may also attack the patient’s tissues.

In an attempt to counter this usually lethal complication, known as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), Katarina LeBlanc of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues transfused a second kind of marrow-derived cell into 16 patients with GVHD.