The Patients' Stories

Safe viruses that can cause lethal diseases in chicken, such as Newcastle disease virus (NDV), are sometimes used as oncolytic viruses (cancer killing viruses) to treat cancer safely. These pictures shown two patients with fully resistant recurrent glioblastoma, an otherwise incurable disease. One of the patients is currently 24 years out and the other one...

Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), stemming from Adenosine deaminase (ADA) enzyme deficiency, proves fatal due to inevitable infections, earning it the moniker “bubble baby” for the stringent isolation required to safeguard against contagion. The sole potential cure lies in successful gene therapy, wherein the ADA gene is introduced into multipotent stem cells responsible for immune system...

Many genetic diseases can be treated by stem cell transplantation from a normal donor. Many genetic disorders can be diagnosed during early pregnancy using a diagnostic amniocentesis or chorionic villus biopsy. Because of this, it was important to investigate if stem cell transplantation could be safely accomplished in utero. To investigate if pre-natal allogeneic stem...

The patient shown above underwent allogeneic stem cell transplantation to treat severe beta thalassemia major. This is an otherwise incurable genetic blood disorder caused by an abnormal production of red blood cells, resulting from genetically-abnormal hematopoietic stem cells. Patients born with this disease depend on frequent blood transfusions. Eventually, many suffer from deformities due to...

This young woman presented with multiply-transfused severe aplastic anemia. Aplastic anemia is an acquired disease characterized by deficiency of hematopoietic stem cells. This results in severe anemia and a constant need of blood transfusions. Furthermore, the lack of production of white blood cells increases the risk of life-threatening infections. Poor platelet production causes a serious...

This patient, a 12-year-old girl from the Philippines, was referred to Prof. Slavin from UCLA for the potential treatment of acute myeloid leukemia, after conventional chemotherapy failed. No compatible donor was available and therefore, high dose myeloablative chemotherapy was accomplished, while the patient’s hematopoietic stem cells were cryopreserved ahead of time. However, complete remission was...

More than 20 years ago, a patient called Ece turned to Professor Shimon Slavin for treatment of an extremely aggressive blood cancer — acute myeloid leukemia — which was resistant to traditional chemotherapy. Ece had previously undergone a bone marrow transplant with high-dose chemotherapy, which was unsuccessful. Despite the professor’s efforts to perform another transplant...

Clinical application of NST or RIC instead of the conventional myeloablative transplant procedure made it possible to offer a cure for elderly patients with no upper age limit or to patients with poor performance status, using safer allogeneic stem cell transplantation procedure. Such patients would have been otherwise excluded from a conventional transplant procedure because...

The principle of NST was based on the idea that elimination of chemotherapy- and radiotherapy-resistant cancer cells could be accomplished using alloreactive donor lymphocytes post-grafting. This could also apply to a large number of hematopoietic stem cells producing Philadelphia-positive chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) cells. Such procedure should take into consideration that the role of the...

In early 1990, non-myeloablative stem cell transplantation (NST) or reduced intensity conditioning (RIC) in preparation for allogeneic stem cell transplantation, was introduced for the first time. The first successfully-treated patient was a young woman with acute myeloid leukemia. Treatment was uneventful and, following successful stem cell transplantation, the patient got married a month and a...