I could not be more proud to share this one. Our study, “The Impact of ABO Compatibility on Allogeneic Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation Outcomes: A Contemporary and Comprehensive Study from the Transplant Complications Working Party of the EBMT,” is now published in Bone Marrow Transplantation — and I have the privilege of being its first author, writing on behalf of the Transplant Complications Working Party of the EBMT
This is, by far, the largest and most meaningful project I have been part of. Regular readers of this blog may remember that I presented this work at EBMT 2024 in Glasgow, where it kindly received the Best Young Oral Presentation award. Seeing it now as a full paper in one of the leading journals of our field feels like the closing of a long, demanding, and deeply rewarding chapter.
The question we set out to answer is one that has quietly divided the transplant community for years: does ABO blood group mismatch between donor and recipient actually affect the outcomes of allogeneic stem cell transplantation? Because the existing evidence came mostly from smaller datasets, the answer had remained genuinely uncertain. Using the EBMT registry, we were able to analyze more than 30,000 patients transplanted between 2010 and 2021 — a scale that let us look at this question with far more clarity than before.
What we found is, in a way, reassuring: overall, ABO incompatibility did not have a major impact on the outcomes that matter most, such as survival and relapse. Our results suggest that, for peripheral blood stem cell transplants, the ABO blood group should not be a primary consideration when selecting a donor. I will let the paper speak for the details, but I hope this helps clinicians make decisions with a little more confidence.
None of this would have been possible alone. I am endlessly grateful to my co-authors and mentors across Europe, and especially to the EBMT and the Transplant Complications Working Party for trusting a young researcher with a project of this size.
You can read the full article here:
👉 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41409-025-02580-8