Bone Marrow Transplant

Experts at the University of Michigan Health Rogel Cancer Center have found a potential solution for preventing a common and dangerous complication in patients that receive stem cell transplants from a donor’s blood or bone marrow.

Research from experts at Michigan Medicine, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine is breaking ground on new ways of treating blood disorders, such as sickle cell anemia, through gene therapy.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Michigan and collaborating institutions working with animal models of GVHD report that alterations in the gut microbiome are connected to an increase in the oxygen levels in the intestine that follows immune-mediated intestinal damage.

When they are not fighting off diseases and infections, immune T cells can sometimes turn on the gastrointestinal system, causing problems such as autoimmune inflammatory bowel disease, graft-vs.-host disease from a bone marrow transplant or colitis from cancer immune checkpoint blocker therapies.

Rogel Cancer Center researchers have identified a drug that, when given along with a bone marrow transplant, drops the risk of leukemia recurring by 20% among the high-risk patients.

By continuously monitoring the body temperature of mice that had undergone bone-marrow transplants, researchers were able to detect early warning signs of graft-versus-host disease -- a dangerous, sometimes deadly response of the transplanted immune system -- in a simple, non-invasive way.