Using mismatched donors for blood or bone marrow transplants is safe and could potentially lead to cures for blood cancers, Vanderbilt Health researchers found.
The study, published in JAMA Network Open, compared nearly 670 patients across three studies: ACCESS trial (2021-2024), BMT CTN 1703 trial (2019-2021), and Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research PRO Protocol observational study (2020-2025).
The ACCESS trial allowed mismatched, unrelated donors for patients lacking a full match. Typically, clinical trials restrict enrollment to matched donors only, according to a Sept. 14 system news release.
It found that ACCESS participants were more than 25 percentage points more likely to come from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds than those in other trials. Nearly half of participants identified as part of a racially or ethnically underrepresented group.
“Many patients need a donor whose tissue type closely matches their own,” Bhagirathbhai Dholaria, associate professor of medicine and a hematopoietic cell transplantation specialist at Vanderbilt, said in the release. “Historically, patients from racial and ethnic minority groups have had a harder time finding a perfectly matched donor because donor registries included fewer people from their backgrounds. As a result, minority patients are referred less often or move more slowly toward transplant because finding a fully matched donor can be difficult. If physicians believe a suitable donor is unlikely, they may never see a transplant physician in the first place.”
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