A discovery by a three-member Albert Einstein College of Medicine research team may boost the effectiveness of stem-cell transplants, commonly used for patients with cancer, blood disorders, or autoimmune diseases caused by defective stem cells, which produce all the body's different blood cells. The findings, made in mice, were published today in the journal Science . "Our research has the potential to improve the success of stem-cell transplants and expand their use," explained Ulrich Steidl, M.
D., Ph.D.
, professor and chair of cell biology, interim director of the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine, and the Edward P.
Evans Endowed Professor for Myelodysplastic Syndromes at Einstein, and deputy director of the National Cancer Institute-designated Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center (MECCC). Dr. Steidl, Einstein's Britta Will, Ph.
D., and Xin Gao, Ph.D.
, a former Einstein postdoctoral fellow, now at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, are co-corresponding authors on the paper. Mobilizing stem cells Stem-cell transplants treat diseases in which an individual's hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells (HSCs) have become cancerous (as in in leukemia or myelodysplastic syndromes) or too few in number (as in bone marrow failure and severe autoimmune disorders). The therapy involves infusing healthy HSCs obtained from donors into patients.
To harvest those HSCs, donors are given a drug that causes HSCs to mobili.