The FDA and the European Medicines Agency have approved Jakafi (ruxolitinib) as a second-line treatment for acute and chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) that hasn’t responded to corticosteroids. But positive results of a phase 2 trial suggest that Jakafi might be used on a preventive basis after patients receive hematopoietic cell transplants to help stave off the development of serious cases of chronic GVHD.

Zachariah DeFilipp , M.D., director of bone marrow transplant research at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues reported results in the journal Blood that showed that 16% of the patients who received a hematopoietic cell transplant and were put on a maintenance dose of Jakafi developed a moderate-to-severe c

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