- 5. April 2019
- 10:25
Collaborative Biobank Research Project wins Poster Award at the 45th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation (EBMT)
At this year’s EBMT meeting, a research project was presented that was carried out with the resources of the Collaborative Biobank. The paper entitled “Does Donor KIR-Genotype impact outcome after unrelated hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for myelodysplastic syndromes or secondary acute myeloid leukemia?” was awarded the prize for the best poster out of 800 papers!
The results of allogeneic stem cell transplantation may be further improved by optimized donor selection. Currently, information on the level of HLA compatibility, CMV compatibility, age and gender of the donor and ABO blood group are used as criteria for donor selection. Recent publications suggest that better utilization of Natural Killer (NK) cell activity may further improve the outcome after transplantation. American research (Boudreau et al., JCO 2017; Venstrom et al., NEJM 2012 and Cooley et al., Blood 2010) has shown that beneficial combinations of donor KIR genes are associated with a reduced risk of relapse.
The research presented at the EBMT aimed to validate these theses in an independent sample of patients with MDS and AML who were transplanted with an unrelated donor between 2008 and 2017.
This research used samples from the Collaborative Biobank and medical data requested from the EBMT Registry and the CIBMTR. Unfortunately, the results of the research groups Boudreau, Venstrom and Cooley could not be proven. Further research is therefore needed to better predict the reactivity of NK cells.
