complete book, pdf, 20 MB

REFLECTION 2004 by Axel Zander

About the authors

Dirk van Bekkum and M. J. de Vries have written the most defining work on the Experimental Bases of Bone Marrow Transplantation. The book Radiation Chimaeras was published 40 years ago in 1967. The discovery of hematopoietic chimerism resulting from intravenous injection of bone marrow cells into lethally irradiated recipients has opened new ways of investigating problems in Immunology, Hematology and Transplantation. Radiation Chimera presents an exhaustive review of comparative pathology and immunologic complication occuring after stem cell transplantation. The book lays the foundation for conditioning with radiation, antigenic differences between host and donor, stability of chimeric state and compares different grafting techniques. It describes acute graft versus host disease, secondary disease, clinical laboratory and pathologic presentation. This book laid the foundation for a second attempt to establish clinical bone marrow transplantation. It is even nowadays worthwhile to look at the basic scientific approach to experimental bone marrow transplantation described in this book. Dirk W. van Bekkum was the director of the Radiobological Institute TNO Riswijk until his retirement in 1990. He has been involved in bone marrow transplantation since 1952. His group provided proof for the repopulation of lethally irradiated mice grafted by donor cells in 1956.

In 1966 he initiated treatment in Severe Combined Immune Deficiency with bone marrow grafts. His laboratory research team demonstrated that graft versus host disease can be mitigated by the suppression of Gram-negative bacteria of the gut and by removal of the T-lymphocytes from the graft.
His team developped cryopreservation techniques which were employed in the clinic and led to the first systematic studies of autologous bone marrow transplantation in leukemia, lymphoma and Hodgkin-disease at the MD Anderson Hospital in Houston, Texas under his pupil Karel A. Dicke. In the late 1980’s he initiated a series of experiments that provided the basis for the use of autologous stem cell transplantation in the treatment of refractory autoimmune diesease.

In the preface to the book Radiation Chimeras Dirk van Bekkum and M. J. de Vries state that the failures of stem cell transplantation occurred “mainly because the clinical applications were undertaken too soon, most of them before even the minimum of basic knowledge required to bridge the gap between mouse and patient had been obtained”.


A statement worthwhile to remember in 2006 looking at adult stem cell studies.

Hamburg, May 2006

Axel R. Zander

complete book, pdf, 20 MB

Book split in parts

PREFACE

I. HISTORY  OF  THE  RADIATION  CHIMAERA

II. THE  PRODUCTION  OF  RADIATION  CHIMAERAS AND  THE  STABILITY  OF  THE  CHIMAERIC  STATE

III. SCONDARY  DISEASE  FOLLOWING BONE  MARROW  TRANSPLANTATION

IV. PATHOLOGY  OF THE  RADIATION  CHIMEARA

V. IMMUNOLOGICAL STUDIES  WITH  RADIATION CHIMAERAS

VI. CLINICALAPPLICATIONS OF  BONE  MARROW TRANSPLANTATION  AND  RELATED  EXPERIMENTS

REFERENCES