Monitoring of pediatric patients with malignant hematological diseases after allogeneic HSCT: Serbian experience.

We describe the implementation of short tandem repeats-polymerase chain reaction (STR-PCR) chimerism analyses coupled with reverse transcription PCR detection of recurrent translocations characteristic for childhood leukemia in monitoring of patients after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in Serbia and the first clinical results thereof. Chimerism and minimal residual disease were regularly analyzed from blood and marrow samples of 26 pediatric patients taken after stem cell transplantation with a median follow-up of 17.6 months. Our results demonstrate that STR-based chimerism monitoring is sufficient in establishing the origin of engrafted cells after transplantation and in detecting graft rejection, but more specific and more sensitive method is necessary for identifying patients with threatening leukemia relapse.