Quality assessment of autologous haematopoietic blood progenitor cell grafting

This paper showed that infused CD34+ cell dose correlated to platelet but not neutrophil recovery. Interestingly, non-remission status, increasing neutrophil contamination of HPC-A and HPC-A, volumes >500ml were strongly associated with delayed engraftment post-autologous transplantation. In conclusion, considering the recent data published in this issue of the Annals of Hematology, our published and unpublished data, we believe that further variables other than CD34+ cell number play a role in transplant outcome. These findings underline the need of a more extensive quality assessment of autologous PBSCT, taking into account that transplant outcome is not only influenced by graft content but also reflected by other important parameters, such as time in hospital, supportive care with blood transfusions and antibiotic therapy, grade of toxicity and the disease-free survival.