Autologous Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation for Crohn's Disease Treatment

The treatment of Crohn's disease has proven to be quite efficacious in the majority of patients with the timely use of combination therapies for remission induction (corticosteroids and/or biologics) and maintenance of disease control (immunosuppressives and/or biologics). However, a proportion of patients fail to achieve complete and long term disease control and often require multiple intestinal surgeries with a risk of developing short bowel syndrome. Lymphoablation followed by hematopoietic stem cell transplantation to rescue the immune system has been proposed as an alternative strategy to induce long term disease control in this high risk population. It has been demonstrated that despite the potential toxicity and morbidity associated with the procedure, the benefit-risk ratio is favorable. Hence, we propose to offer HSCT to selected CD patients, and to study mechanisms of reducing T cell autoreactivity which will hopefully lead to more focused therapeutic approaches in the future.