Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation monitoring in childhood. Hematological diseases in Serbia: STR-PCR techniques

Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a very successful method of treatment for children with different aquired or inborn diseases. The main goal of post-transplantation chimerism monitoring in HSCT is to predict negative events (such as disease relapse and graft rejection), in order to intervene with appropriate therapy and improve the probability of long-term DFS (disease free survival). In this context, by quantifying the relative amounts of donor and recipient cells present in the peripheral blood sample, it can be determined if engraftment has taken place at all, or if full or mixed chimerism exists. In a group of patients who underwent hematopoietic stem cell transplantation at the Mother and Child Health Care Institute, we decided to use standard human identfication tests based on multiplex PCR analyses of short tandem repeats (STRs), as they are highly informative, sensitive, and fast and therefore represent an optimal methodological approach to engraftment analysis.