Meet Sergio A. Giralt, MD
Sergio A. Giralt, MD, is Chief of the Adult Bone Marrow Transplant Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is a board-certified hematologist/oncologist whose clinical practice and research focus on stem cell transplantation for patients with blood disorders. Dr. Giralt and his colleagues pioneered the use of reduced-intensity conditioning regimens for older or more debilitated patients with blood cancers, and are currently using and studying T cell depletion techniques to dramatically reduce the risk of graft-versus-host disease, a serious complication of donor stem cell transplantation.
Dr. Giralt is also an expert in the treatment of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that affects plasma cells. His research in this area is focused on developing new conditioning regimens for autologous transplant, a treatment approach in which patients receive an infusion of their own stem cells or bone marrow following a course of high-dose chemotherapy, as well as developing strategies that will reduce "symptom burden" and make the treatment so tolerable that it can be done on an outpatient basis. He led the Myeloma Intergroup Committee of the Blood and Marrow Clinical Trials Network, which developed the current national study looking at the role of consolidation therapy after autologous stem cell transplant for patients with myeloma.
Most recently, Dr. Giralt was Deputy Chair of the Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering in May 2010 as Chief of the Adult Bone Marrow Transplant Service. He is also the past chair of the steering committee of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network, a federally funded group that defines the research agenda for stem cell transplantation in the United States.
