Sergio A. Giralt, MD

My research focus has been on improving treatments for older patients who have acute and chronic leukemia. My colleagues and I pioneered the use of reduced-intensity conditioning regimens for older or more debilitated patients with blood cancers. Before this discovery, older patients with these diseases were rarely considered candidates for stem cell transplantation procedures using donor cells because of the toxic effects of high-dose chemotherapy. The development of these less intense and less toxic regimens has allowed us to perform transplants for older patients in a safe and effective manner and has changed the standard of care throughout the world. I plan to continue this research in the context of the pioneering T cell depletion techniques developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering. This new approach has dramatically reduced the risk of graft-versus-host disease, a serious complication of donor stem cell transplantation. Disease recurrence after transplantation remains an important cause of treatment failure, and I am a proponent of post-transplant maintenance therapies using a variety of targeted therapies, which we are continuing to explore at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

I am an expert in the treatment of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that affects plasma cells (the cells that produce the antibodies that protect us against infections). My research in this area has focused on developing new conditioning regimens for autologous transplant, a treatment approach in which patients receive an infusion of their own stem cells or bone marrow following a course of high-dose chemotherapy, as well as developing strategies that will reduce “symptom burden” and make the treatment so tolerable that it can be done on an outpatient basis. Our goal is to deliver the most effective therapies with minimum symptom burden. I led the Myeloma Intergroup Committee of the Blood and Marrow Clinical Trials Network, which developed the current national study looking at the role of consolidation therapy after autologous stem cell transplant for patients with myeloma.

As a strong believer in collaborative science among large academic centers, I have been involved in many multi-institutional projects and until recently chaired the executive board of the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research. I am also the past chair of the steering committee of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network, a federally funded group that defines the research agenda for stem cell transplantation in the United States.