Results of clinical blood, marrow stem cell transplant matching now online.

For the first time researchers can go online to check on the results from clinical blood and marrow stem cell transplants involving unrelated donors

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), all components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the public database February 17th.

The centralized resource provides genetic as well as age, gender and ethnicity data on more than 1,300 transplant donors worldwide. With the availability of the new database, researchers can generate and test hypotheses on the role of donor matching in blood and marrow stem cell transplants, NIH said in a press release. The survival rates of people who received cell grafts are also provided to help doctors and their patients evaluate the potential risks and benefits of transplantation in treating disorders like leukemia.

The database is available online at: www.ncbi.nih.gov/mhc.

In addition, the database contains scientific and clinical data on the relationship between major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes and transplantation. MHC genes vary widely throughout the general population, so blood and marrow stem cells from one person may be rejected when transplanted into a recipient who does not closely match the donor's MHC type. The database allows scientists and physicians to search for information. For example, a physician can look for the results of transplants involving a recipient with a given set of MHC genes and an unrelated donor with another set of MHC genes.

Effie Wang Petersdorf, MD, professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who leads the team of researchers and clinicians contributing transplant data to the project says the widespread availability of clinical results may help researchers recognize the limits of MHC mismatching.

"If we know which MHC mismatches may be tolerable, it may increase the use of transplantation as a curative therapy for patients who do not have a matched donor," Petersdorf said.

To ensure patient and donor privacy, none of the clinical information in the database contains personal identifiers such as birth dates. The available data includes patient and donor MHC types, ethnicity, age and gender as well as the description of the transplant, the disease diagnosis and the number of days the recipient survived after the transplant.