Stem cell transplantation program marks 28th anniversary
More than 3,400 patients have undergone a transplant at Penn State Health’s Bone Marrow Transplantation Program since its inception in 1996. Faced with certain aggressive blood cancers, diseases or genetic disorders that have not responded to conventional treatments, they’ve received lifesaving hematopoietic stem cell transplants that replace unhealthy bone marrow with healthy marrow that makes white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets.
Dr. Witold Rybka pioneered the stem cell transplantation program at Penn State Cancer Institute 28 years ago. At the time, it was the first stem cell transplantation program available in central Pennsylvania and remains so to this day.
The advances in treatment more than two decades later have been significant, Rybka said in a 2022 story marking the program’s 25th anniversary.
“We’ve seen major changes extending to the types of diagnoses we can treat with stem cell transplantation and the types of transplantation, from extracting and manipulating a person’s own stem cells and transplanting them back, to transplantation between people using different sources,” he said.
The demographic who can benefit has also shifted from mostly children and young adults to include people up to their 80s. An exciting evolution of transplantation has been the development of immune cell therapies and the correction of genetic lesions in the cell products.
Although Rybka no longer sees patients, he serves as director of the Hematopoietic Cell Therapy Laboratory. Under the direction of Dr. Shin Mineishi, the stem cell transplantation program continues to provide close to 200 transplants each year. It is accredited by the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy. FACT is the only accrediting organization that addresses all quality aspects of cellular therapy treatments.
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