Anti-cancer drug effective against common stem cell transplant complication
“Bortezomib helped a group of patients who desperately needed a treatment, having failed multiple different therapies,” said UC Davis hematologist and associate professor Mehrdad Abedi, lead author on the paper. “The drug fights chronic graft-versus host disease, and unlike other GVHD therapies such as steroid, cyclosporine or mycophenolate, it treats chronic GVHD without dampening the graft-versus-tumor effect, which can be critically important to help patients avoid relapse. In fact, because bortezomib is an anti-cancer drug, it potentially attacks cancer cells in its own right.” The trial results were published in October in the journal Blood. Chronic GVHD strikes patients who have received stem cell transplants from donors, commonly called allogeneic transplants. …