JCO corrects missing data in transplant GVHD prophylaxis trial tables
A Journal of Clinical Oncology erratum has corrected two documentation errors in a transplant study that examined post-transplant cyclophosphamide-based graft-versus-host disease prophylaxis after mismatched unrelated donor peripheral blood stem cell transplantation. The amendment is narrow but important: Table 1 contained a missing data category, and Table S2 in the Data Supplement also included missing data. Both have now been corrected in the online record, with the journal stating that the article was fixed as of September 16, 2026.
For transplant physicians, those details are not clerical trivia. In a field where donor selection, conditioning intensity, and prophylaxis strategy can shape relapse risk, immune reconstitution, and early post-transplant toxicity, even a missing category in a baseline table can distort how clinicians interpret the balance of the cohort. A supplemental table error can matter just as much, especially when readers use those tables to trace subgroup distributions, adverse events, or protocol characteristics that are not fully visible in the main text.
The correction applies to the September 1, 2025 article by Mobley and colleagues, which was published with the errors now acknowledged and fixed. The journal lists the erratum in Volume 44, Number 30, on page 2979, and notes that the original article appears in the same volume family as the corrected record. The published correction does not add new efficacy outcomes, new safety signals, or new transplant endpoints. It simply restores completeness to the study’s reported data structure.
A one-line table omission can change how a transplant cohort is read.
In practice, the credibility of hematopoietic cell transplantation research depends on granular reporting. Patients receiving peripheral blood stem cell grafts from mismatched unrelated donors already face a complicated immune interface: donor T cells must reconstitute immunity without triggering severe alloreactivity, while the prophylaxis strategy must blunt graft-versus-host disease without erasing the graft-versus-leukemia effect or compounding infection risk. Post-transplant cyclophosphamide has become central to that balancing act because it selectively eliminates rapidly proliferating alloreactive T cells after infusion, thereby reducing the inflammatory cascade that drives acute graft-versus-host disease. When a paper in this area includes incomplete table data, readers may misread the composition of the treatment population or the completeness of supporting analyses.
The corrected article title makes clear that the underlying clinical question remains the same: how best to prevent graft-versus-host disease after a mismatched unrelated donor peripheral blood stem cell transplant. The erratum does not alter the intervention under study or the clinical setting. It also does not revise the authorship list, and the journal includes a standard apology for the errors. Still, this kind of amendment is clinically relevant because transplant practice often depends on close reading of supplemental material, where protocol stratification, missingness, and subgroup definitions can influence how a center interprets applicability to its own patients.
For investigators, the correction also serves as a reminder of how much modern oncology research relies on supplementary reporting. Main-text manuscripts can only hold so much detail. Tables often carry the operational core of a transplant paper: baseline disease characteristics, donor relationships, conditioning details, graft source, prophylaxis regimens, and follow-up distributions. A missing data category in Table 1 may obscure how many patients were unclassifiable in a critical variable. Missing data in Table S2 may complicate interpretation of extended analyses or descriptive summaries. In a high-stakes transplant cohort, transparency around missingness is part of the scientific record, not an afterthought.
The clinical consequences are indirect but real. Hematopoietic cell transplantation teams often compare published cohorts with their own institutional populations before adopting a prophylaxis approach. If the published table undercounts incomplete data or omits a category, that center may overestimate how neatly its own patients fit the trial frame. Once corrected, the article provides a cleaner basis for comparison, even though the underlying results are unchanged.
The erratum also reflects a broader principle in oncology publishing: accuracy in reporting is inseparable from accuracy in interpretation. In transplantation, where immune toxicity, donor mismatch, and prophylaxis strategies are tightly interwoven, a missing table field can reverberate beyond editorial housekeeping. It can affect how researchers design follow-up studies, how clinicians read subgroup summaries, and how evidence is incorporated into local protocols.
This correction leaves the clinical question unresolved in the only way an erratum can: it does not revisit efficacy, toxicity, or survival. It only repairs the record. The remaining task for readers is to return to the parent study with the corrected tables in mind and judge the prophylaxis strategy on its full, now-complete presentation.