The NMDP Donor/Recipient Pair Project
Background
In 1987 the NMDP began collecting research samples with informed consent in an attempt to perform retrospective HLA analysis on all unrelated bone marrow transplants facilitated by the NMDP. These samples are processed and stored frozen at the NMDP Research Repository at the Blood Systems Research Institute.
The NMDP has long recognized the importance of developing HLA typing strategies and has implemented several HLA typing projects to address issues in the area of histocompatibility testing. In an effort to address several key concerns about histocompatibility in unrelated bone marrow transplantation, the NMDP developed a research project tasked with the following goals: determine the impact of HLA matching on unrelated transplant outcome, study HLA diversity at the allele and haplotype level, and improve the accuracy, capacity and technology of allele level typing while reducing costs. Stored research samples from the NMDP’s Repository were to be completely high resolution allele level typed at the class I (HLA-A, B, C) and class II (HLA-DRB1/3/4/5, DQA1, DQB1, DPA1, DPB1) loci. The project, named the Donor/Recipient Pair Project, was launched in June of 1994.
All of the infomation listed below was submitted by participants in the NMDP Donor/Recipient Pair Project contract laboratory network. The NMDP has selected these examples as references for laboratories interested in implementing high resolution HLA typing. For more specific information about histocompatibility testing using these techniques, laboratories are encouraged to consult the current edition of the ASHI Laboratory Manual (www.ashi-hla.org/publications/lab-manual/), the International Histocompatibility Working Group Web site (www.ihwg.org) and the references cited by the various laboratories.