Plasma biomarkers of risk for death in a multicenter phase 3 trial with uniform transplant characteristics post-allogeneic HCT.

A phase 3 clinical trial (BMT CTN 0402) comparing tacrolimus/sirolimus (Tac/Sir) vs tacrolimus/methotrexate (Tac/Mtx) as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) prophylaxis after matched-related allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) recently showed no difference between study arms in acute GVHD-free survival. Within this setting of a prospective, multicenter study with uniform GVHD prophylaxis, conditioning regimen, and donor source, we explored the correlation of 10 previously identified biomarkers with clinical outcomes after allogeneic HCT. We measured biomarkers from plasma samples collected in 211 patients using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (Tac/Sir = 104, Tac/Mtx = 107). High suppression of tumorigenicity-2 (ST2) and T-cell immunoglobulin mucin-3 (TIM3) at day 28 correlated with 2-year nonrelapse mortality in multivariate analysis (P = .0050, P = .0075, respectively) and in a proportional hazards model with time-dependent covariates (adjusted hazard ratio: 2.43 [1.49-3.95], P = .0038 and 4.87 [2.53-9.34], P