Emerging Options For Patients With Blood Cancers in Need of HSCT

Mitchell E. Horwitz, MD, professor of medicine, director of the Adult Blood and Marrow Transplant Program, Duke Cancer Institute, Duke University Medical Center, discusses the next steps for research following the FDA approval of omidubicel (Omisirge) for patients with blood cancers in need of an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT).

Transcription:

0:10 | For those familiar with the field, for patients who don’t have a match, there have been a growing number of options. One option for patients who don’t have a match is to use a half-match and to use a donor from the family who’s not a match, such as a parent, a child, or a sibling that’s a half match. Many, if not most, patients will have half-match options and that has over the years competed with the use of umbilical cord blood as a donor source. The half-matched option has become the most popular option for patients without a match because of the ease with which those products can be obtained. Patients, children or parents or siblings, are willing to give stem cells for their family members.

1:14 | The downside of umbilical cord blood has been that it’s costly, and that there were potential limitations in its efficacy. I think with the approval of omidubicel, we have another option that we need to study further. We need to reconsider umbilical cord blood as a stem cell source in the context of omidubicel and launch studies to answer important questions as to what the benefits and disadvantages are, and how this new stem cell product fits in our field.

2:00 | Those studies have been slow to emerge because we have had the feeling that we need to know about umbilical cord blood stem cells. But now, this changes everything. New questions arise, and that’s incumbent on the stem cell transplant community to conduct these studies so that when a community oncologist refers a patient for a transplant or stem cell transplant, they know that their patients will have the best chance of survival and coming back to them for their long-term follow-up.