Prevention and Treatment of Relapse by Drugs

Relapse has become the most frequent cause of treatment failure after HCT (Horowitz et al. 2018). Because outcome after relapse remains poor, major efforts are focused on prevention of relapse. Beside adoptive cell-based options, such as DLI and CAR T cells, the availability of novel effective pharmacological compounds has opened new avenues in clinical research to use those drugs early after HCT in order to prevent and treat relapse (Kroger et al. 2014). The optimal pharmacological compound should have a safe toxicity profile, an antitumor effect to the underlying disease, and an immune profile which can be used to booster the graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) effect and to reduce the risk of GVHD.