Multimodality treatment of germ cell cancer patients who had progression or relapse after high dose chemotherapy and autologous bone marrow transplantation

PURPOSE

When a patient with germ cell tumor (GCT) fails to be cured with high dose chemotherapy (HDC) and autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (auto- BMT) the overall prognosis is very poor and any further treatment has only palliative character. A question requiring answer is how intense should this kind of treatment be, and what can be expected from it.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

Of 44 patients with GCT who were transplanted after HDC in our centre between 1999- 2005, 17 experienced treatment failure. Amongst them 14 had marker-positive relapse or confirmed germ cell histology. Another 3 had second primary neoplasms. Of the 17 patients 14 received further treatment that consisted of surgery alone in 2, chemotherapy in 2, radiotherapy in 1, combined surgery + chemotherapy in 5, chemotherapy +surgery + radiotherapy in 3 and chemotherapy + radiotherapy in 1 patient.

RESULTS

The median survival from the time of relapse was 3 months in all patients, and 6 months in the 14 patients who received further treatment. In 6 patients with relapse confined to a single site the median survival was 11 months. Three patients in this group are alive with overall survival (OS) of 37.4+, 24.3+ and 6.2+ months (all had multimodal treatment: chemotherapy + surgery or radiotherapy, and all achieved durable complete response/CR).

CONCLUSION

Our results suggest that GCT patients who have relapsed/ progressed after HDC may benefit from further treatment. Best chances for long term survival have those who experience relapse confined to one metastatic site and receive combined treatment (surgery or radiotherapy plus systemic therapy).

Allogeneic non-myeloablative hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma -- single center experience

We evaluated the efficacy of allogeneic non-myeloablative stem cell transplantation (NST) in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC). A total of 5 patients received blood stem cells from HLA identical siblings. Conditioning consisted of: cyclophosphamide 60 mg/kg/d, days -7 to -6 and fludarabine 25 mg/m2/d for consecutive days [days -5, -4, -3, -2, -1]. The median CD34+ cell dose was 3.34 million/kg. Immunosuppression consisted of cyclosporine A and methotrexate. Among all, four patients achieved full donor chimerism with a median of 89 days. One patient rejected the graft and received the second transplantation. Grade II-III acute GVHD occured in 3 patients. None of patients achieved complete or partial response and there were only two mixed responses. All patients died due to cancer progression. There were no transplant-related deaths. Summarising, NST regimen allows allogeneic engraftment with low treatment related mortality in this high-risk population of patients. Acute and chronic GVHD are the major morbidities. Progression is common after NST in unselected patients with advanced RCC. However, regression of some metastases suggests that the graft versus tumor effect may occur after this type of treatment. At present such a procedure should be considered as an experimental approach.