ABSTRACT
The hypothesis that bone marrow transplantation (BMT) can provide an effective antileukemia reaction was tested in experimental models during the very earliest days of BMT research. Barnes and coworkers [1], in their 1956 paper entitled ‘‘Treatment of Murine Leukaemia with X Rays and Homologous Bone Marrow,’’ described the potential and problems of using allogeneic BMT for the treatment of leukemia in this way:
When mice are given an otherwise lethal dose of x rays to the whole body they can recover if injected intravenously with homologous [allogeneic] myeloid cells. . . . This suggests that leukemia of the mouse might be successfully treated. On the one hand, the dose of x rays which is sufficiently lethal to normal cells of the bone marrow and lymphatic tissues to cause death of
the animal might well be completely lethal to leukemic cells. . . . On the other hand, if the dose of x rays sufficient to kill the animal is not 100% lethal to leukemic cells, the malignant condition would in these circumstances recur by growth from the surviving cells, since neither host not graft has the ability to resist; but, if homologous bone marrow from a different strain of mouse were given, the colonizing cells might retain the capacity of the donor to destroy by the reaction of immunity these residual leukemic cells-and perhaps also the host.
