HLA tissue matching and methods therefor

A tissue matching engine, comprising:

• an HLA database storing HLA information for a donor tissue including a top ranked HLA allele as a donor first HLA-type and a re-ranked non-top HLA allele as a donor second HLA type;
• at least one computer readable memory storing software instructions;
• and
• at least one processor coupled with the HLA database and the memory, and upon execution of the software instruction then performs the operations of:
• obtaining omics data from a recipient tissue of a patient;
• decomposing the omics data into k-mers having a length less than 60;
• generating a composite de Bruijn graph from the k-mers and from a reference sequence for known HLA alleles;
• ranking the known HLA alleles based on a composite match score from votes of sequence reads in the omics data where the votes are from k-mers matching the known HLA alleles;
• identifying a recipient first HLA type of the recipient tissue from a top ranked HLA allele of the known HLA alleles;
• identifying a recipient second HLA type of the recipient tissue from a re-ranked non-top-ranking HLA allele of the known HLA alleles based on an adjusted composite match score;
• identifying, from the HLA database, the donor tissue as being compatible with the patient based on the recipient first HLA type and the donor first HLA type or the recipient second HLA type and the donor second HLA type;
• and
• wherein the omics data is derived from at least one of the following:
• RNAseq data, whole genome sequencing, exome sequencing, transcriptome sequencing, and targeted sequencing.