Unsupervised Clustering Analysis of Regimen and HLA Characteristics in Pediatric Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantation.

HLA matching is a critical factor in allogeneic unrelated hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) because of its impact on post-transplantation survival and quality of life. Umbilical cord blood transplantation (UCBT) offers unique advantages, but determining the optimal approach to graft selection and immunosuppression remains challenging. Unsupervised clustering, a machine learning technique, has potential for analyzing transplantation outcomes, but its application in investigating leukemia outcomes has been limited.

Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantation for Fanconi Anemia With a Special Focus on Late Complications: a Study on Behalf of Eurocord and SAAWP-EBMT.

Hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) remains the sole available curative treatment for Fanconi anemia (FA), with particularly favorable outcomes reported after matched sibling donor (MSD) HCT. This study aimed to describe outcomes, with a special focus on late complications, of FA patients who underwent umbilical cord blood transplantation (UCBT). In this retrospective analysis of allogeneic UCBT for FA performed between 1988 and 2021 in European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT)-affiliated centers, a total of 205 FA patients underwent UCBT (55 related and 150 unrelated) across 77 transplant centers.

The Role of the European Medicines Agency in the Safety Monitoring of COVID-19 Vaccines and Future Directions in Enhancing Vaccine Safety Globally.

The European Union (EU) regulatory network was at the forefront of the safety monitoring of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. An unprecedented number of case reports of suspected adverse reactions after vaccination called for huge efforts for the assessment of this safety information, to ensure that any possible risks were detected and managed as early as possible, while ruling out coincidental but temporally related adverse health outcomes. We describe the role of the European Medicines Agency alongside the EU regulatory network in the safety monitoring of the COVID-19 vaccines, and provide an insight into challenges, particularities and outcomes of the scientific assessment and regulatory decisions in the complex, dynamic international environment of the pandemic.

HLA peptide-binding pocket diversity modulates immunological complications after cord blood transplant in acute leukaemia.

Pocket motifs and their amino acid positions of HLA molecules are known to govern antigen presentation to effector cells. Our objective was to analyse their influence on the risk of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and relapse after umbilical cord blood transplant (UCBT). The transplant characteristics of 849 patients with acute leukaemia were obtained from the Eurocord/EBMT database.