What is graft versus host disease, and why does it occur in patients with acute myeloid leukemia?

What is graft versus host disease and why does it occur in patients with acute myeloid leukemia?

So GvHD stands for graft versus host disease. Right there, you know we start to lose people off the bat.

So it's important to know that it is not a complication of this disease, but rather a complication of a therapy for AML, that a lot of patients find themselves needing to go through in the course of their journey towards a cure.

So graft versus host disease, what we mean by graft is actually when we use Stem cells from another patient in a person to try to eradicate sort of the residual disease or the stem leukemia cells that can be very stubborn and refractory to other forms of treatment. So that being the graft, we also refer to the patient as the host, because they do become the host for these cells that go in and create a new immune system.

That immune system is a very powerful thing, and it is very important to affect what we call graft versus leukemia, or the new immune cells going after leukemia cells. But graft versus host disease is sort of this, pairing, if you will, this alternate path that the immune system can take, where those adopted immune cells go after any part of the patient in a negative way.

So something that we don't want to happen but see very often after transplant.