Simplifying the unrelated donor (URD) selection process for hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) appears to be feasible, researchers concluded after conducting a study involving >10,000 individuals. Investigators sought to develop and validate a donor selection score that emphasized donor characteristics linked with better survival in participants who received HCT from 8/8 HLA-matched URDs between either 1999 and 2011 (n=5,952) or 2012 and 2014 (n=4,510). Patients were broken into training and test sets at a 2:1 ratio. Among the results:

• Donor selection score could not be validated.
• Younger age was the only donor characteristic linked with better survival; 2-year survival was 3% better when donors were 10 years younger.

The authors noted that their findings indicate that clinicians can be flexible in selecting URDs based on characteristics other than age.