Grant: Foundation Grant

My objective is to improve the efficacy and safety of blood and marrow transplantation (BMT), and, ultimately, to expand its clinical applications. BMT is a life-saving procedure and the only immune therapy for leukemia with established long-term curative outcomes. BMT comes with a high cost of long-term complications. The complication that really limits the ability of BMT to help cure people a disease called chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGvHD). cGvHD is caused by the donor's transplanted immune system (graft) attacking the recipient's tissues (host) that received the new transplanted graft. cGvHD can be fatal but more commonly causes long term disabilities such as inability to walk, write, or take care of one's self with more than twice as many medications and doctor visits as a person who had a BMT and did not develop cGvHD. cGvHD can also be life long affecting a person's ability to work or attend school. Children and adolescents due to their long expected life are particularly vulnerable to the long-term problems of cGvHD. Our ability to get rid of cGvHD is limited by our inability to predict when it will of will not happen and which medical approaches will work best to treat it. One way to decrease cGvHD is to have better blood tests or biomarkers that cane be used to assist in guiding medical care. Our group at BC Children's Hospital is the only one worldwide to work on cGvHD biomarkers for children and we are close to have tests that will help to minimize this serious disease in the next few years. With our work we hope to use cGvHD biomarkers to personalize therapy, develop new therapies, and expand its use of BMT.