What types of transplants are patients more likely to experience graft vs host disease (GVHD)?

From which types of transplants are patients more likely to experience Graft versus Host Disease?

So the only types of transplants from which we worry about graft versus host disease are the genetic transplants, where they're getting cells from another person. Another person is going to have genetic differences with our patient.

That may lead to there being slight differences in their tissues and what that immune system has gotten accustomed to being a normal part of the self, the job of the immune system to say, this belongs here with me or this does not.

So when you put that immune system into a different person, there's a chance it's going to say, this does not belong with me and sort of attacking the body.

And so that is the only setting in which we see this graft versus host disease, with rare exception being when there are transplants done for solid organs where some immune tissues go with that organ, like the intestinal tract. Sometimes, a little bit with the lungs, you can see graft versus host disease in that situation or in a patient that is severely immunocompromised that got a whole blood transfusion that was not irradiated.

So it's very rare that you see graft versus host disease outside of an allogeneic transplant. And allogeneic transplant is the almost exclusive place that anyone will see this graft versus host disease.