Chimerism Testing For Engraftment
Rapid and highly sensitive chimerism lab tests for post-transplant monitoring.
Chimerism occurs when a person’s body contains two different sets of DNA. After an allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT), the presence of both donor and recipient cells in the transplant recipient can be evaluated following the procedure. This evaluation can be used to monitor engraftment success, immune reconstitution, and risk of relapse or graft failure.
Versiti Diagnostic Labs offers sophisticated chimerism testing for post-transplant patients, including those who received solid organ transplantation, bone marrow transplantation and cellular therapy treatments.
Versiti’s Chimerism by NGS testing takes advantage of hundreds of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) found on all human autosomes (aka chromosomes) as well as the high data output of next generation sequencing (NGS) to provide sensitive and reliable results to monitor the relative amounts of recipient and donor cells present post-transplant. In technical validation studies NGS based chimerism testing has been found to provide more sensitive results and earlier detection of mixed chimerism in post-transplant monitoring compared to STR/VNTR based assays.
Chimerism testing is performed using 202 biallelic SNPs across 22 autosomes that are used to uniquely identify recipient and donor cells in the sample. PCR amplification and next generation sequencing is performed and analysis of the informative markers identified in pre-transplant samples enables relative quantification of recipient and donor cells.
This test is performed in two parts:
Versiti Diagnostic Laboratories’ expertise includes:
We support our transplant partners by helping to monitor the relative amounts of recipient and donor cells after transplantation. Important clinical events in allogenic bone marrow transplantation, such as engraftment, relapse and the effects of post-transplant therapies can be monitored on a molecular level by using inherent genetic differences between recipients and donors.
Versiti Diagnostic Labs’ genetic chimerism testing has proven reliability, demonstrated by consistent, accurate, and precise performance in proficiency testing programs.
Enriched cell populations can also be used to monitor patients following hematopoietic stem cell transplant for more precise detection of changes in transplant dynamics. Testing for the following cell subtypes is available:
| Cell Marker | Cell Subset |
| CD3 | T cells |
| CD19 | B cells |
| CD33 (incl. CD66b) | Myeloid cells |
| CD56 | Natural Killer cells |