BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Killing HSCs softly

Have your HSCT and keep your thymus too

June 9, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

In Nature Biotechnologythis week, researchers from Harvard University mellowed the typically harsh preconditioning procedure for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). By using an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) instead of irradiation, the team thinks it has a regimen safe enough to enable broad use of emerging autologous HSCT therapies.

David Scadden, professor of medicine at Harvard and the principal investigator on the study, told BioCentury that preconditioning toxicity is the primary obstacle for genetically modified autologous HSCT, which has the advantage over allogeneic HSCT of not risking graft-versus-host disease (GvHD)...