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Originally published February 11, 2026
Last updated February 12, 2026
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The USC Norris Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy Program, part of Keck Medicine of USC and the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, has once again been recognized as one of the top-performing allogeneic transplant programs in the United States. The program recently announced it earned the highest possible +1 performance score from the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR). This designation reflects exceptional one-year survival outcomes that significantly exceed national predictions, and it is the nation’s highest performance distinction for an allogeneic transplant program.
In the 2025 CIBMTR analysis of 176 U.S. transplant programs, only eight programs nationwide achieved a +1 score. Notably, the USC Norris Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy Program is one of just four programs in the country to have attained this elite status for six consecutive years — a testament to sustained excellence.
Each year, CIBMTR evaluates one-year survival following allogeneic transplantation using outcomes from three consecutive years of patients who have passed the one-year post-transplant milestone. Transplant programs are benchmarked against national risk-adjusted expectations and assigned a score of −1, 0, or +1 based on performance. With a one-year allogeneic transplant survival rate of 86%, the USC Norris Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy Program ranks among the highest-performing adult allogeneic transplant programs in the nation, underscoring its leadership in delivering outstanding, life-saving care.
Below, program director Preet M. Chaudhary, MD, PhD, shares his team’s best practices that have helped it sustain its leading level of patient care.
Allogeneic bone marrow transplants are among the most complicated medical procedures. Many challenges need to be overcome in order to achieve a positive outcome.
The first challenge is that, inherently, these patients are very sick. The majority have some sort of very aggressive leukemia or lymphoma or some other blood disorders, and we must figure out how to keep their disease under control.
There is also the challenge of identifying which patients are going to truly benefit from transplantation. We need to make sure that a patient’s disease is not at such an advanced stage that they wouldn’t be able to benefit from treatment and that the procedure is not too risky for the patient.
After the immediate transplant period, we must manage patients long-term to prevent complications such as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) or infections, some of which can be fatal. In addition, we need to monitor patients for the effects of the very strong immunosuppressive drugs we use, evaluating their toxicity and impact on vital organs.
At a high level, those are some of the major challenges we are fighting on multiple fronts at the same time.
The first is related to immunosuppression. One of the biggest challenges 10 to 15 years ago was finding a suitable match donor for a patient. Then about a decade ago, people started using haploidentical transplant whereby the donor doesn’t have to be fully matched to the recipient. That ability has been critically important for a region like Southern California where the majority of patients are racially and ethnically very mixed, making it difficult to find fully matched donors. The USC Norris Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy Program was one of the early adopters of haploidentical transplant, and it allowed us to move patients to transplant faster rather than just waiting to find the right matched donor.
As more transplant centers began performing haploidentical bone marrow transplants, however, they found that the standard methods of immunosuppression typically used for fully matched transplants was not very effective in haploidentical transplants. An entirely different immunosuppressant regimen needed to be developed, and we saw this happen.
At the USC Norris Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy Program, our experts recognized very early on that since the newer immunosuppression regimens had such good results in haploidentical patients, we should apply it to fully matched patients as well. We became an early adopter of the new regimen for all of our transplant patients, which I think resulted in our higher success and better survival rates.
Beyond that, there have been key advancements in strategies for preventing infections, especially in patients at risk of viral, fungal or material infections.
One of our key strengths as part of Keck Medicine of USC is that we have access to world-class experts across the whole spectrum of care, from cancer and beyond, as opposed to a transplant center that focuses only on treating cancer. This is important because the problems bone marrow transplant patients experience aren’t just limited to bone marrow but usually extend to other organs.
In our program, if a patient needs treatment for neurological or kidney complications, or a pulmonary or liver infection, we have the expertise needed close at hand. Our multidisciplinary capabilities also extend far beyond clinical factors alone. Transplant patients need to have the right psychosocial, nutritional and other supports, and we are able to provide them.
That is one of our advantages as a medical center with expertise beyond cancers. If our patients run into issues, we have surgical, medical and other expertise available across the whole spectrum of organs and diseases.
Another strength is that within our program itself, we are very scientifically minded and apply the latest scientific knowledge to the clinical care of our patients. In some areas, we are ahead of other institutions in incorporating the latest knowledge.
Finally, we have been very fortunate to have a team that truly works together to maintain best practices in our protocols, procedures and workflow. Everyone in our program is a critical member of the team: APPs, nurses, nurse navigators, coordinators, pharmacists, social workers, nutritional experts, psychosocial experts, the team that harvests and processes cells, the people who help facilitate insurance authorization, as well as our fellows, residents and trainees who are at the ground level in the trenches taking care of patients.
It’s a very complex workflow, and we have been very fortunate that we have an excellent team to be able to achieve all those things.
We are investing heavily in the next generation of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, some of which we hope will eventually replace the need for transplant. While CAR T-cell therapies are often a better alternative than traditional chemotherapy and other treatments, CAR T-cell therapies do have their limitations. For example, they do not work for all solid tumors, which represent 95% of all cancers. And even with regard to the blood cancers for which they do work, there are a lot of toxicities, including neurological toxicities and cytokine release syndrome (CRS), that can potentially be fatal. Finally, there is a significantly high rate of relapse.
Knowing this, our program researchers are developing the next generation of CAR-T, called Synthetic Immune Receptor-T (SIR-T)*, that is unique to us. Our researchers have seen significant success with these SIR-T in preclinical studies, not only in blood cancers but also in solid tumors for which traditional CAR-T is usually unsuccessful.
Our hope is that these new SIR-T therapies will treat a wide variety of cancers, not only traditional leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma but also prostate cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, GI cancer, brain cancer — pretty much every type of cancer.
We’ve already seen a lot of interest in our technologies, and we have been very fortunate to have received significant funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) as well as the U.S. Department of Defense. Our next step will be clinical trials, and if they are successful, this could be a paradigm shift in how cancers are treated.
First, I would say that while we’re proud to be one of the top programs in allogeneic transplant, we also remain humble about what transplant can achieve or not achieve. We are always cognizant of the fact that, despite its life-saving abilities, transplant has its inherent limitations, and we cannot become complacent.
Secondly, transplant patient cases are so complex, and we are always working with incomplete information, that no physician, no matter how good or how experienced he or she is, can be right all the time. The margin of safety for these patients is so small that you can make one mistake and things can go wrong. Because of that, as a team we have mandated what I believe is a unique approach that results in a whole different level of care for patients.
In medicine, some physicians can get into a territorial mindset of, “This is my patient. I’m going to make the decisions,” but in our program we have collectively come to the consensus that for these patients, we as providers need to seek each other’s advice. That means that if anyone on our team observes that a patient’s status is deviating from the normal course, they are expected to let the whole program team know, no matter who is the attending taking care of the patient. This gives everyone on the team the opportunity to review the case and suggest next steps.
This level of collaboration happens in addition to our standard multidisciplinary meetings. So on top of those meetings, anytime people round in the morning and they find a patient’s course is deviating, whether on the inpatient or outpatient side, they are expected to let the team know. In short, ego is put aside. Patient welfare is foremost, and as a team we do the best together to fight for the patient and figure out what’s best for their care.
As a program director, my philosophy is that the patients we treat are inherently sick, and procedures will always be risky. I know that, despite our team’s best efforts, there will be cases in which outcomes will not be desirable. I make sure that our team members know that we are not going to blame you for that. If, for some reason, your patient declines, you are not responsible for a bad outcome. Their responsibility, however, is to let the rest of the team know as soon as things are not going right, instead of just trying to manage the patient on their own.
This is the team approach we all embrace here. I’ve seen other programs where physicians sometimes become territorial, but at our center, we agree that we need to put the patient’s welfare at the center, and that everyone should feel welcome to seek advice from the team. So, in addition to the fact that our program is science-based and clinically sophisticated, another element of our program that I’m very proud of is the fact that we have this extra level of empathy for the patient and always put the patient first.
* Angeles Therapeutics Inc., a University of Southern California startup company, holds rights to the SIR-T platform. Dr. Chaudhary is the founder of Angeles Therapeutics and holds equity interest in the company.
