Gretchen Henkel is a health and medical journalist based in California.
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HSCT for Severe Autoimmune Diseases
Despite the innovations of new biologics and disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs, a large unmet need remains for patients with rheumatic autoimmune disease. Treatment remains limited for many conditions, including for conditions with a dim prognosis, such as systemic sclerosis.1 One promising treatment avenue is hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HSCT). Here, we provide background on HSCT for severe…
Ethics Forum: What to Do When an Autoimmune Patient Needs a Transplant?
Despite our best efforts and modern interventions, we still have patients in the intensive care unit with organ failure. Although renal failure can be mitigated by dialysis, patients with cardiac or respiratory failure secondary to active autoimmune disease raise difficult clinical and ethical issues. Two recent cases, both with organ failure, led us to examine…
Stem Cell Transplantation Benefits Patients with Scleroderma
A recently published study gives new insight into an innovative approach to treating patients with severe scleroderma and internal organ involvement. During the six-year study, researchers demonstrated the durability of the beneficial effects of stem cell transplantation in this patient population. Their data also suggest the treatment has the potential to renormalize the autoreactive immune system…
Progress on Preventing Immune-Related Adverse Events
ATLANTA—One of the hottest topics in medicine is the emerging field of cancer immunotherapy. However, immune-related adverse events (irAEs) are associated with the therapy, and when things go wrong, they can go very, very wrong, said Ryan Sullivan, MD, during the 2019 ACR/ARP Annual Meeting in November. “The guiding principle of cancer immunotherapy is [that]…