New therapeutic modalities in the treatment of graft-versus-host disease

Acute and chronic GVHD are still a major concern in allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, still contributing substantially to morbidity and mortality in this therapeutic procedure. Over the past decade, many advances have been made with regard to the prevention and treatment of GvHD using various drugs such as cyclosporine A, FK506, mycophenolate mofetil and/or monoclonal IL-2 receptor antagonists. Despite these measurements with regard to the prevention of acute GVHD, it is very difficult to treat these clinical conditions successfully. However, if patients do not experience any GvHD often the desired effect of graft versus leukemia (GvL) remains absent increasing the probability of a relapse, in particular, in patients transplanted, which are considered at higher risk for relapse. At the present time, new strategies in the prevention of acute GvHD are in progress in particular the use of genetic manipulated donor T cells expressing suicide genes. Further clinical and laboratory studies are required in order to improve the prevention and. in particular, the therapy of established GvHD. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.