Donor-specific differences in long-term outcomes of myeloablative transplantation in adults with Philadelphia-negative acute lymphoblastic leukemia

We analyzed long-term outcomes of myeloablative stem cell transplantation (SCT) in 292 adults with Philadelphia (Ph)-negative acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Donors were related (RD; n132), unrelated (URD; n68; 30 well-matched (WM), 19 partially matched (PM), 19 mismatched (MM)) and autologous (AUTO; n=92). After a median follow-up of 85 months, the risk of relapse was higher for AUTO-SCT than for RD-SCT (P=0.001). MM-URD-SCT yielded higher risk of non-relapse mortality than RD-SCT (P=0.010). As a result, disease-free survival (DFS) at 5 years was inferior using AUTO (46.1%; P=0.010) or MM-URD (26.3%; P=0.036), whereas DFS from other donor sources was approximately equivalent (53.5% for RD, 63.3% for WM-URD and 57.0% for PM-URD). Other factors associated with poorer DFS included SCT beyond first complete remission (CR), older age and adverse cytogenetics. In a pairwise comparison of outcomes between RD-SCT and AUTO-SCT for patients in first CR, the inferiority of AUTO-SCT was observed, particularly in high-risk patients. Conversely, in standard-risk patients, AUTO-SCT yielded comparable outcomes to RD-SCT. SCT using RD, WM-URD or PM-URD may be considered the best donor sources for adult high-risk Ph-negative ALL.