Hematologic Disease

This study is a single center, prospective, single arm exploratory clinical trial that includes patients with hematological malignancies who are indicated for allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo HSCT) but lack suitable donors. This project plans to use highly mismatched unrelated HLA mismatched donors. Ultimately, an unrelated human leukocyte antigen (HLA) mismatched allo HSCT transplantation plan will be established to improve the disease prognosis of this group of patients and truly enter the era of "everyone has a donor" for allo HSCT.

We propose to perform NGS and OGM with DNA extracted from bone marrow (BM; site of cancer) and NGS on skin fibroblast DNA (proxy for germline) on all patients with hematologic malignancies (HM) who undergo a standard-of-care BM biopsy at Georgia Cancer Center/Wellstar MCG Health. Simultaneous 4 mm punch skin biopsy for fibroblast culture will be obtained at the planned puncture site of the BM biopsy. The bone marrow biopsy and aspirate are already part of the patient's scheduled medical evaluation and the punch biopsy of the skin is the only additional procedure involved in the study.