Timothy S. Olson MD, PhD

Timothy S. Olson is a Medical Director of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Olson's clinical efforts focus on pediatric hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), with a specific emphasis on HSCT for patients with inherited and acquired bone marrow failure. Through his combined clinical activities in the Bone Marrow Failure Center within the Division of Hematology and the Blood and Marrow Transplant Section within the Division of Oncology, his goal is to facilitate outstanding care for patients with inherited bone marrow failure and acquired aplastic anemia during their transition from diagnostic evaluation to treatment through HSCT.

In coordination with these clinical efforts, his clinical research program seeks to retrospectively and prospectively assess HSCT outcomes for patients with inherited and acquired bone marrow failure syndromes and other non-malignant hematologic conditions, including sickle cell disease and thalassemia major. He is the lead/site Principal Investigator of several investigator-initiated and multicenter clinical trials of HSCT for these diseases, for which the ultimate goal is to define optimal approaches to transplant timing, donor choices, and graft engineering.

The goal of his laboratory research program is to improve HSCT outcomes by identifying methods to decrease the incidence of graft failure following HSCT, which is a particularly critical challenge in the setting of transplants for non-malignant conditions such as bone marrow failure. Methods are being examined to enhance donor hematopoietic stem cell engraftment efficiency following HSCT through enhancement of the functions of specialized areas of the bone marrow microenvironment, known as hematopoietic stem cell niches. Currently, therapeutic strategies are being tested that can be applied to enhance niche activity and receptivity for donor stem cells, which would in turn improve donor engraftment efficiency following clinical HSCT.