A reduced-intensity bone marrow transplant regimen developed by Johns Hopkins physicians provides durable engraftment with low rejection rates and also may preserve fertility, according to results of a new study conducted by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center investigators.
The research, published online March 26 in Blood Advances, was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health.
“The survival rate in the long run in our study was about 95%, so we are curing the overwhelming majority of people who are transplanted, with mismatched donors,” says senior study author Javier Bolaños-Meade, M.D., a professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Essentially, nearly everybody who has either sickle cell disease or thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder, can be cured, because nearly everybody has a donor.”