Addition of Plerixafor to Mobilization Regimens in Autologous Peripheral Blood Stem Cell Transplants Does Not Affect the Correlation of Preharvest Hematopoietic Precursor Cell Enumeration with First-Harvest CD34+ Stem Cell Yield

The CXCR4 antagonist plerixafor is increasingly used in the mobilization regimens for autologous peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) transplantation. This agent may mobilize a different subset of the stem cell population than traditional regimens, such as growth factors (with and without chemotherapy). Thus, it is important to determine whether plerixafor has an effect on the utility of measurements used to predict the yield of CD34+ cells, usually either preharvest peripheral blood CD34+ enumeration by flow cytometry or hematopoietic precursor cell (HPC) enumeration by automated hematology analysis. Although HPC enumeration has a weaker correlation with first-harvest CD34+ cell yield, this parameter still plays an important role in the timing of apheresis procedures for autologous PBSC transplantation because of its technical simplicity and low cost. In the present study, we retrospectively examined the correlation of HPC measurements with CD34+ cell yields in patients with multiple myeloma and lymphoma undergoing autologous PBSC transplantation, and investigated how the mobilization regimen affected these results. We found that the correlation coefficients ranged from 0.5877 to 0.7668 and were not significantly impacted by differences in diagnosis or inclusion of plerixafor in the mobilization regimen. The predictive ability of HPC enumeration for various target yields was also examined, and receiver-operating characteristic curves were generated. An HPC cutoff of 20 should result in adequate initial CD34+ cell yields (>2.5 × 106 cell/kg) in >80% of autologous donors with or without plerixafor. This study confirms the utility of HPC enumeration in prediction of adequate initial cell yields, and demonstrates that this utility is maintained regardless of whether or not plerixafor is included in the mobilization regimen.