Tumour cell contamination of autologous stem cells grafts in high-risk neuroblastoma: The good news?

Abstract

We analysed the effect of graft-contaminating tumour cells on the long-term survival of 24 patients with high-risk neurobtastoma and found that patients whose grafts contained detectable neuroblastoma cells had a significantly higher probability of survival than did patients with no detectable tumour cells. Estimated contamination of the graft by more than 2000 tumour cells was associated with a significantly higher probability of survival than contamination with fewer tumour cells. We hypothesise that the presence of a critical number of graft-contaminating neuroblastoma cells can elicit a protective antitumour immune response after autologous transplantation. © 2003 Cancer Research UK.