Bruno L. Cadilha
@c-bl
The José-Carreras Foundation for Leukemia granted me a research scholarship for the next 3 years to improve the treatment options for patients with Graft-versus-Host Disease (GvHD). I'm beyond grateful for the opportunity! Thread on why it matters! 🧵1/9
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Bruno L. Cadilha
@c-bl
Leukemia is a potentially deadly blood cancer. In different forms, it can affect anyone at any age. You can read about it for example here: https://www.cancer.gov/types/leukemia 2/9
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Bruno L. Cadilha
@c-bl
What you won't read is how hard one is thrown down at diagnosis. You have cancer. Yet you are young, very well taken care of yourself and full in the middle of planning your life. It's not f* fair. The amount of information you must soak in at diagnosis is tremendous. The treatments will drag you through hell. If you manage to get through them, chances are, adverse effects will have left scars that will make you need to re-learn how to live. But you have a chance, in some cases this disease is curable - and that's why we solely focus and emphasize that now is not the time to let yourself down. It's time to fight, to have faith, to take a deep breath and to make this next moment count. This fighting spirit means everything, to us healthcare professionals, to the families and to you. So, to the science part now. 3/9
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Bruno L. Cadilha
@c-bl
Some cells are mutated into having unfair proliferative advantages. They will progressively expand and exhaust important resources and space from other healthy compartments. For instance in Acute Myeloid Leukemia we will try to push back with Chemo, but that is rarely the end of it. Antibodies might enable better pushback if you match an adequate risk profile and there is sadly still not an approved chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy for this particular leukemia. So later down the line, many patients will go into an Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation (Allo-SCT). 4/9
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Bruno L. Cadilha
@c-bl
Allo-SCT: Eliminating the problem by its root. With a myeloablative chemotherapy, all circulating hematologic cells (healthy and leukemic) will in a matter of days perish, and so will the bone marrow, the place from where they stem. The cancer will be hopefully gone - but so will be healthy hematopoiesis. At this point you must receive a bone marrow transplant in order to survive, otherwise white, red blood cells and platelets won't come back on their own. 5/9
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