The EFI program featured exciting talks and posters on organ and stem cell transplantation, immunological tolerance, evolutionary and population genetics, HLA-associated diseases and AI-based biomarkers for graft rejection and prognostic modeling.

In addition to our booth and the engaging exchanges with our partners, we contributed to the program and to the field of leukemia immunogenetics with several scientific posters. These showcased our newly developed end-to-end Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) workflow for Measurable Residual Disease (MRD) quantification in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), HemaTrack ALL [view here], the characterization of novel MICA Alleles [view here] as well as the genotyping of the challenging HLA-DRB4*03:01N allele [view here].

A highlight worth mentioning was the presented abstract “HLA Loss Relapses after Transplantation: Time of Origin and Facilitation from Exposure to Ganciclovir” by Cristina Toffalori et al. The authors impressively demonstrated how the antiviral drug Ganciclovir may promote HLA loss through DNA damage and repair, thus driving leukemia immune escape after allogeneic haploidentical hematopoietic cell transplantation (Haplo-HCT), which might have potential clinical implications in the future.

We had a great time at the conference and we are excited about the future impact of these new developments, as well as future EFI conferences!