[PDF][PDF] Hematopoietic-cell transplantation at 50

FR Appelbaum - New England Journal of Medicine, 2007 - redbook.streamliners.co.nz
New England Journal of Medicine, 2007redbook.streamliners.co.nz
50th anniversary of E. Donnall (Don) Thomas's initial report of a radical new approach to
cancer treatment: radiation and chemotherapy followed by the intravenous infusion of bone
marrow. 1 That publication represented the beginning of a long series of laboratory and
clinical investigations; more than a decade would pass before the procedure achieved its
first successes. Yet Thomas's persistence in the face of criticism and clinical failure ultimately
paid off in a new form of therapy that was used to treat approximately 50,000 people …
50th anniversary of E. Donnall (Don) Thomas’s initial report of a radical new approach to cancer treatment: radiation and chemotherapy followed by the intravenous infusion of bone marrow. 1 That publication represented the beginning of a long series of laboratory and clinical investigations; more than a decade would pass before the procedure achieved its first successes. Yet Thomas’s persistence in the face of criticism and clinical failure ultimately paid off in a new form of therapy that was used to treat approximately
50,000 people worldwide in 2006 (see timeline).
Thomas’s interest in the possibility of hematopoietic-cell transplantation was sparked in 1949, during his residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, when he learned of Leon Jacobson’s experiment showing that a mouse exposed to otherwise lethal irradiation would survive if its spleen, or in later studies its marrow, was shielded. 2 That its survival was due to a cellular rather than humoral effect was proven several years later, when researchers showed that irradiated mice giv-
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