Thanks to Duke’s stature as a leading referral center, our team directs or participates in studies of the very latest and most promising approaches to bone marrow transplantation. These include:

• The growing use of bone marrow transplant with less intense chemotherapy regimens, making this course of care feasible for older, sicker patients than previously possible.
• Tandem transplants (two sequential transplants) have been shown in studies to boost remission rates by 20 percent in patients with myeloma.
• Pharmacological manipulation and selection of donor cells, which helps improve outcomes and reduce complications such as graft vs. host disease, and make bone marrow transplantation available to greater numbers of patients. This research is especially vital in adult bone marrow transplant, as fewer than 25 percent of adult patients have access to closely matched donors.
• Bone marrow transplants that do double duty as cancer vaccines. Combining transplants with dentritic cells “trained” to recognize cancer cells shows promise in helping to reduce the rate of relapse.
• The use of bone marrow transplant in non-cancerous diseases such as scleroderma, lupus, and multiple sclerosis; early studies are showing success with stabilizing or reversing some of these disease states.
• The use of partially matched cord blood or haplo-identical stem cells allows most patients to utilize transplantation, not only those with a matched sibling.