A trial looking at high dose chemotherapy and stem cell transplants for people with Hodgkin lymphoma (PAIReD)

This trial showed that stem cell transplants using cells from other people could be useful for Hodgkin lymphoma that has not gone or has come back.

Results
A total of 31 people had a treatment as part of this trial. 

They all had high doses of chemotherapy to begin with. This is called conditioning. They had the drugs carmustine, etoposide, cytarabine, melphalan and alemtuzumab. We have information about most of these in our cancer drugs section.

They then had a stem cell transplant using cells from other people:

• 11 people had a transplant using cells from their brother or sister
• 20 people had a transplant using cells from a someone they weren’t related to  

By 3 years after treatment, the lymphoma had come back or got worse in 5 people (16%). Four of these people went on to have other treatment which worked well.

They also found that in total:

• 25 people (81%) were living
• the lymphoma had not got any worse in 21 of these 25 people (68%) 
• 1 person (3%) died because their lymphoma had got worse
• 5 people (16%) died because of other medical problems such as breathing problems or infections

These results are a bit better than you might see for people having a stem cell transplant using their own cells.

People taking part had a PET scan before treatment to see if their lymphoma was active or not. The transplant worked as well for those who had active lymphoma as those who didn’t. 

Side effects
One of the side effects of a stem cell transplant using cells from someone else is graft versus host disease (GvHD). This is where the immune system recognises the cells are not your own and attacks them. This causes problems such as diarrhoea, skin rashes and liver problems.

The team found that:

• 4 people (13%) had moderate GvHD 
• 2 people (7%) had severe GvHD
• no one had very severe GvHD
• 6 people (22%) had longer term GvHD

This is a bit lower than you might expect after a transplant using someone else’s stem cells.

Conclusion
The team concluded that these results were encouraging. And that a transplant using someone else’s stem cells could be used to treat some people with high risk Hodgkin lymphoma.

More detailed information
There is more information about this research in the reference below. 

Please note, the information we link to here is not in plain English. It has been written for healthcare professionals and researchers.

Allo-HSCT in transplant-naïve patients with Hodgkin lymphoma: a single-arm, multicenter study
Emma Das-Gupta and others
Blood Advances, 2019. Volume 3, number 24, pages 4264 – 4270.

Where this information comes from
We have based this summary on the information in the article above. This has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed ) and published in a medical journal. We have not analysed the data ourselves. As far as we are aware, the link we list above is active and the article is free and available to view.