Clinical Study attributes
Patients enrolled on this study will have received a stem cell transplant. After a transplant, while the immune system grows back the patient is at risk for infection. Some viruses can stay in the body for life, and if the immune system is weakened (like after a transplant), they can cause life-threatening infections. Adenovirus (AdV) is a virus that just causes symptoms of a common cold normally, but which can cause serious life-threatening infections in patients who have weak immune systems. It usually affects the lungs and can cause a very serious pneumonia, but it can also affect the gut, the liver, the pancreas and the eyes. Investigators want to see if they can use a kind of white blood cell called T cells to treat adenovirus infections that occur after a transplant. Investigators have observed in other studies that treatment with specially trained T cells has been successful when the cells are made from the transplant donor. However as it takes 1-2 months to make the cells, that approach is not practical when a patient already has an infection. Investigators have now generated AdV-specific T cells from the blood of healthy donors and created a bank of these cells. Investigators have previously successfully used frozen virus-specific T cell lines generated from healthy donors to treat virus infections after bone marrow transplant, and have now improved the production method and customized the bank of lines to specifically and exclusively target AdV. In this study, investigators want to find out if the banked AdV-specific T cells derived from healthy donors are safe and can help to treat adenoviral infection. The AdV-specific T cells (Viralym-A) are an investigational product not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Funding source - FDA OOPD
