For more than 25 years, clinicians and researchers have recognized younger donor age as a significant factor in leading to better outcomes for transplant. This, in turn, has led to shifts in donor-selection strategies that focus on age as well as human leukocyte antigen (HLA) match.

A panel session at the 2025 Tandem Meetings will build on that knowledge by sharing insights from recent age-focused research and discussing how this information might guide future studies and decisions in characterizing optimal suitability of donors.

Stephen Spellman, MBS, vice president of research at NMDP℠ and senior scientific director for CIBMTR®, will lead this conversation as chair of the session Dissecting Donor Age: Impact on Allogenic Transplantation Outcomes and the Science of Stem Cell Aging, beginning at 10:30 a.m. on Feb. 13 in Ballroom B.

“The importance of age in transplants has been known and described for quite some time, but what hasn’t been well understood is the biology behind it,” Spellman said. “We will try to shed light on some of those changes that occur in the immune system as it ages and modifies over time at variable rates among individuals.”

The featured experts will approach the impact of age from various perspectives.

Karthik Nath, MD, clinical hematologist and deputy director of cellular therapy at Icon Cancer Centre in Brisbane, Australia, will set the stage with an overview of the current understanding of the clinical impact of donor age in transplants and what the data reveals about strategies to optimize age as a factor in donor selection.

Lukasz Gondek, MD, PhD, associate professor of oncology at John Hopkins University, will then cover clonal hematopoiesis and its impacts on the immune system over time.

The third panelist, Kira Young, PhD, research scientist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, will consider how insights into the aging of immune systems from murine models might provide clues to, in effect, turn back the clock.

“We’re looking at the current situation of where we are in terms of donor selection and donor utilization, why older donors might not be as suitable, what is happening to the immune system as we age, and ways that this could be characterized and defined prior to use of those donors,” Spellman said, adding that the goal is to open queries and research into new ways to distinguish suitable donors — not just by chronological age, but by immune function or other factors.

Spellman said he hopes the panel session will encourage discussion about how an expanded understanding of the aging of the immune system and the impact of age can be used to better define suitable donors. This is particularly relevant for patients and their medical teams who must draw from a donor base where the majority of registry donors worldwide are over the age of 30, he noted.

“Is chronological age simply the measure? I don’t think it is that simple,” Spellman said. “When we have a limited donor pool, we want to be able to further characterize based on other factors — it might be an immune profile, a biomarker, or something along those lines — that allow us to distinguish and determine if an older donor might not just be a suitable donor, but the optimal donor for a given patient.”

This and other sessions at the 2025 Tandem Meetings | Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Meetings of ASTCT® and CIBMTR® will be available for on-demand viewing for registered attendees following the live presentation.