Drug candidate to enhance bone marrow transplant success

Just after chemo and radiation, and just before a bone marrow transplant, a patient’s immune system is on high alert ready to wage war against foreign invaders. While this immune system army in all our body tissues helps protect us against disease, it can also cause major side effects during tissue transplants.

---

In bone marrow transplants, between 30 to 70 percent of all patients develop a disease caused by the immune system in the donor tissue. Like in a sci-fi horror movie, the tissue transplant starts attacking the patient’s own organs. This graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) means a lifetime of immune suppressant drugs – chemicals that come with their own bag of problems. But the Israeli company Enlivex has developed a new trick to help a patient accept foreign tissue more readily, improving the odds and outcomes for people suffering from leukemia, lymphoma and other blood cancers requiring bone marrow transplants. In early human clinical trials in Israel on 13 people, the Enlivex drug candidate ApoCell was found to “miraculously” take a bone marrow transplant patient out of the danger zone in stages 3 and 4 GvHD, which usually have fatal outcomes. More...

---