Haematopoietic chimerism and donor lymphocyte infusion after allogeneic SCT in children with non-malignant disease: is there an option to improve outcome?

Allo–SCT is a well-established treatment modality for children with several acquired and inherited disease affecting the haematopoietic stem cell or their derivatives. Treatment failures after allo–SCT are mostly caused by graft rejection (GR). Increasing mixed chimerism (in-MC) represents a stage at the very beginning of graft rejection, where immunological intervention might be an effective prophylactic approach. To substantiate this, we monitored haematopoietic chimerism after allo–SCT of peripheral blood samples and performed pre–emptive immunotherapy by donor lymphocyte infusion (DLI) in patients with in-MC…