HLA typing: A review of methodologies and clinical impact on haematopoietic cell transplantation

The importance of the HLA gene system in haematopoietic cell transplant outcomes was established early on and advances in both fields have led to ever increasing success of this clinical therapy. In large part, improvements in the understanding of HLA have been driven by the advancement in typing technologies. Each iteration of typing technology has improved the resolution of HLA typing, and often enabled the identification of polymorphism within the HLA loci. The discovery of the enormous amount of variation in the HLA genes, and the need to be able to characterise this for clinical HLA typing, has often resulted in a move away from one typing method to another more suited to typing of this complexity. Today, the gold standard for HLA typing are methods that can produce definitive HLA typing results.