How are donors selected for an allo transplant?

How are donors selected for an allo transplant?

So donors are picked sort of depending on the kind of transplant you're doing. So there is some matching that goes on. You are come from your mom. So my guess is that there's a 100% chance that you're at least half matched. So if they're considering doing a haplo identical transplant, you would be eligible as a donor. Would it be you versus one of your five siblings? I think it depends on there are sort of more nitpicky things about it. What viruses have you been exposed to? Are you male or female? Sometimes male donors maybe have less graft versus host disease produce. What other medical problems do you have? So there's a whole host of things.

And a lot of times there are just, many donors for patient. And it's kind of like I let them choose which one of you want to do it. Because to me, it's not like one is better than another medically, but who wants to do it? Some people say, look, I want to be the person, dude. Other people say, oh my god, I don't really want to do it, but I'll do it. And so I think that those things start to come into play.

What age of immune system do you want for an allo transplant? So the donor selection is again, a moving field. Many years ago when we were not so good at picking donors or looking at their matches, we used to always go for a sibling that was matched to the patient themselves. But most of your siblings are going to be around your own age. So if you are a 70 year old person with multiple myeloma, your siblings are probably going to be between 60 and 75. So your siblings are older.

And then over time, the way we select donors became more and more sophisticated. And we have large donor registries which have more than 15 million people worldwide who are on the block or volunteers. So signed up to be donors. So it turned out that we could actually select unrelated people who are actually matched. Actually the system of genes in your body, which are immune response of genes that predict who can be a donor to who in terms of bone marrow transplantation.

So it's called the HLA system. So we do something called HLA matching to select a donor. So these days you can select an HLA matched donor who's not related to you, who might be in another country, for example. But at young age or, you know, most of these donors and the big registries are between the ages of 20 and 45. So if you're a 70 year old person and you get a younger, unrelated donor, the risk from transplant is generally these days unrelated transplants and sibling transplants are the same risk, but you get a better younger immune system.