Immune marker predicts transplant success and improves selection of bone marrow donors

The risk of death following bone marrow transplantation can be reduced about 60 percent using a new technique to identify bone marrow donors who make the most potent cancer-fighting immune cells, according to research from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The findings appear in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The research builds on an earlier St. Jude discovery that specialized immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells dispatched cancer cells more efficiently when the NK cells carried a particular version of a KIR protein on their surface...
Source: Health News from Medical News Today - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Transplants / Organ Donations Source Type: news