Stem Cell Transplantation in Hematologic Malignancies

Dear Colleagues,

Stem cell transplantation is a “trusted and true” procedure that is widely employed in clinical medicine to treat malignant as well as nonmalignant diseases. Although stem cell transplantation has been around for more than half a century, the development in this field has been continuous. High-dose therapy followed by autologous stem cell transplantation remained a mainstay as consolidation therapy for lymphoproliferative diseases with a curative potential in lymphoma and was the state-of-the-art in multiple myeloma, but these therapies were recently challenged by chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy. It has a more limited but important role in myeloproliferative and autoimmune diseases. On the other hand, allogeneic stem cell transplantation provides the advantage of a graft-versus-tumor (GvT) effect and remains the procedure with the highest curative potential in adult acute leukemias and multiple other rare diseases. Although the allogeneic approach has been hindered for a long time due to the lack of proper donor availability, recent developments in prophylaxis and therapy for graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) resulted in a much-reduced transplant-related morbidity and mortality. This opened new avenues in the field for unrelated donor transplantations as well as for haploidentical transplantations, providing curative therapy for previously untreatable patients, and bringing up new problems that need solving. Transplantation once was thought to be a one-shot therapeutical approach; however, nowadays, the field has turned towards accepting the role of post-transplant consolidation and maintenance therapies to further improve the results of the transplantation. More recently, genetic manipulation of stem cells has entered the field of human therapy, and the transdifferentiation ability of hematopoietic stem cells is being increasingly used in regenerative medicine trials. In this Special Issue, manuscripts from all areas of hemopoietic transplantations and related procedures—both clinical and experimental—are welcome with the goal of representing the entire expanding field of stem cell transplantations, with a special emphasis on hematological malignancies.

Dr. Gabor Mikala
Guest Editor

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• hemopoietic stem cell
• transplantation
• autologous
• allogeneic
• haploidentical
• graft versus tumor
• graft versus host
• consolidation therapy
• maintenance therapy