Dr. Sergio Giralt, MD is a board-certified hematologist-oncologist, and his clinical activity and research focus on stem cell transplantation for patients with blood disorders. Dr. Giralt trained and worked for many years at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where he was Deputy Chair of the Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies. In May 2010, Dr. Giralt joined the faculty of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to lead the Adult Bone Marrow Transplant Service.

Dr. Giralt’s research focus has been on improving treatments for older patients who have acute and chronic leukemia. With his colleagues, he pioneered the use of reduced-intensity conditioning regimens for older or more debilitated patients with blood cancers. Before this discovery, older patients with these diseases were rarely considered candidates for stem cell transplantation procedures using donor cells because of the toxic effects of high-dose chemotherapy. The development of these less intense and less toxic regimens has allowed the performance of transplants for older patients in a safe and effective manner and has changed the standard of care throughout the world. Dr. Giralt plans to continue this research in the context of the pioneering T cell depletion techniques developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering. This new approach has dramatically reduced the risk of graft-versus-host disease, a serious complication of donor stem cell transplantation.

Dr. Giralt is an expert in the treatment of multiple myeloma.  His research in this area has 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. His goal is to deliver the most effective therapies with minimum symptom burden. Dr. Giralt 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.