ECTmatch - Optimizing Small-Scale Cord Blood Banking Through HLA Analysis

Abstract

Cord blood (CB) banks have had to rely on large inventories of CB units to try to serve the largest possible proportion of the population, all the while prioritizing collection of non-Caucasian ethnic groups. However, due to the high linkage disequilibrium of HLA genes and the high frequency of several HLA alleles in the population, CB banks contain hundreds of CB units that could be matched to the same patients, making the inventory somewhat redundant from a clinical standpoint.ExCellThera developed ECTmatch, an algorithm dedicated to optimizing the selection of CB units based on in-depth HLA analysis in order to maximize the efficiency of the bank to suitably match the largest proportion of subjects within a small pool of donors.The performance of ECTmatch was evaluated in a simulation aiming to select 100 CB units from the Héma-Québec CB bank that satisfied an arbitrary minimal cell content criteria of 120 × 107 TNC and 6 × 106 CD34+ cells (n