A prognostic score for acute graft-versus-host disease based on biomarkers: a multicentre study

Abstract

SUMMARY Background Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is the major cause of non-relapse mortality (NRM) after allogeneic hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HCT). The severity of symptoms at the onset of GVHD does not accurately define risk, and thus most patients are treated alike with high dose systemic corticosteroids. We aimed to define clinically meaningful risk strata for patients with newly diagnosed acute GVHD using plasma biomarkers. Methods We prospectively collected plasma from 492 HCT patients with newly diagnosed acute GVHD and randomly divided them into training (n=328) and test (n=164) sets. We used the concentrations of three recently validated biomarkers (TNFR1, ST2, and REG3α) to create an algorithm that computed the probability of NRM six months after GVHD onset for individual patients in the training set alone. We rank ordered the probabilities and identified thresholds that created three distinct NRM scores. We evaluated the algorithm in the testset, and again in an independent validation set of 300 additional HCT patients enrolled on multicenter clinical trials of primary therapy for acute GVHD. Findings In all three datasets, the cumulative incidence of twelve month NRM significantly increased as the GVHD score increased (8% [95% confidence interval (CI); 3%, 16%], 27% [95% CI; 20%%, 34%], and 46% [95% CI; 33%, 58%], for scores 1, 2 and 3 respectively in the multicenter validation set, p<0 · 0001). Conversely, the response rates to primary GVHD treatment decreased as the GVHD score increased (86%, 67%, and 46%, for scores 1, 2 and 3 respectively in the multicenter validation set, p<0 · 0001). Interpretation Biomarker-based scores can be used to guide risk-adapted therapy at the onset of acute GVHD.