Donor selection for patients undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic SCT: Assessment of the priorities of Canadian hematopoietic SCT physicians

摘要

The success of an allogeneic hematopoietic SCT (HSCT) is dependent on a multitude of factors, including the procurement of an optimal graft source. Further, the quality of this graft depends on a variety of donor and/or host characteristics. Most importantly, HLA compatibility between the recipient and donor is considered the dominant characteristic in this field, where it remains paramount in ensuring the potential success of the allogeneic HSCT. However, there are other important donor characteristics. These non-HLA characteristics may be broadly considered to be either traditional characteristics, such as ABO compatibility or novel, such as cytokine or KIR polymorphisms. Unsurprisingly, traditional characteristics have been reviewed extensively while novel characteristics are less studied. With better HLA matching techniques,these non-HLA donor characteristics would be further scrutinized, with a view that optimizing them would lead to improved transplant outcomes. Consequently, we sought to understand the relative priorities that the physicians of the Canadian Blood and Marrow Transplant Group (CBMTG) place on such non-HLA donor characteristics using conjoint analysis (CA), a pair-wise choice-based survey method.