From Bedside to Bench and Back to Bedside: Travels in the Systems Biology of GVHD​
Leslie S. Kean, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, presents for the Science of Childhood Cancer - St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Leslie S. Kean, MD, PhD, on Bone Marrow Transplantation: Using Abatacept to Prevent Graft-vs-Host Disease​
Leslie S. Kean, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, discusses findings from her analysis of the International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research Database, which led to the recent FDA approval of abatacept for the prevention of acute graft-vs-host disease (GVHD) in adult and pediatric patients
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Arthritis drug reduces rates of acute graft-vs-host disease after bone marrow transplant
​Exciting news from a Phase 2 trial led by Leslie Kean (Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s), published Friday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. A repurposed rheumatology drug, abatacept, reduced the risk of severe, acute graft-vs.-host disease after bone marrow transplant and improved GVHD-free survival. The drug was especially beneficial in patients with an imperfect donor match (on just 7 of 8 HLA factors).
2020 TCT Meeting Video
A Family United
For the Sze household, there is no stronger bond than family. So, when one member needed a life-saving stem cell transplant the question wasn’t whether or not anyone would volunteer, but rather how quickly could each of them be tested as a possible donor.
Orencia GVHD granted Breakthough Designation by US FDA
A drug used for rheumatoid arthritis has moved a step closer to FDA approval for a desperately needed new use. The drug, abatacept, has gained FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for preventing acute, severe graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) in patients receiving bone marrow transplants. That could help fast-track the drug to the clinic.
Dr. Leslie Kean on Pediatric Hematology and Cancer
"One of the main focuses of my research is to bring trials to patients undergoing transplant to help make transplant more effective and
more safe."
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Cell Circle - Best Science Images of the Year
​Each tiny dot in this circle represents one of around 100,000 cells from rhesus macaque monkeys. Cells with similar traits cluster together, and each colour represents different tissues such as the thymus and lymph nodes (blue) and bone marrow (red). Click here to read the full article.
Picture Credit: Carly Ziegler, Alex Shalek, Shaina Carroll (MIT) and Leslie Kean, Victor Tkachev and Lucrezia Colonna (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute)/Wellcome Photography Prize 2019
American Society of Hematology "Author Voices" featuring Dr. Leslie Kean and Dr. Benjamin Watkins
"The idea of the study was to understand a new targeted agent for Graft-Versus-Host Disease, but as bone marrow transplants one of the key questions that we really struggle with in our patients is how they reconstitute their immunity after transplant."
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CIPO2015: Clues from Graft-Versus-Host Disease to Design Successful Immunotherapy
"What I'm going to show you today is a lot of the work we've done trying to identify the mechanisms that cause T-cells to induce GVHD
in our patients and what this can teach us for immunotherapy."
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Inflammatory bowel disease, bone marrow transplant precision medicine clinical trial opens
In an effort to find new strategies to personalize treatment for pediatric patients, Seattle Children's has opened the first clinical trial applying next-generation T-cell receptor (TCR) sequencing and single-cell gene expression analysis to better understand how the immune system drives both inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in pediatric autoimmunity patients and graft-versus host disease (GVHD) in pediatric bone marrow transplant (BMT) patients.