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In bone marrow transplantation finding a donor whose HLA genes are identical or almost identical to those of the transplant recipient is immensely difficult due to the high polymorphism of these genes, but is crucial to the success of the intervention. A statistical meta-analysis of survival data for 1347 hematopoietic cell transplantations is presented. In a newly developed parametric model of survival time distributions, prospects of recipients were described by a function of mismatch counts between donor and recipient for six HLA genes (HLA-A,-B,-C,-DRB1,-DQB1,-DPB1). Using the maximum likelihood framework to tune parameters to find the best fit of a given model to the data, and also to compare different models, we carried out exhaustive variable selection cycles for different model subtypes. We have shown that under our modelling assumptions mismatches of HLA-C & HLA-DPB1 alleles between donor and recipient have a negative effect on recipients’ survival prospects.

There have already been reports showing the importance of HLA-C matching, but there have been no strong evidence for association between HLA-DPB1 mismatches and transplant-related risk increase. If other studies support the finding that HLA-DPB1 allele mismatches have a negative effect on survival, it should have an impact on clinical protocols for finding appropriate hematopoietic cell donors for patients.