About 10% of people who have a transplant experience organ rejection. Doctors say it’s important to catch it early for two reasons: to save the organ, and because the chances of rejection go up with each additional organ transplant.
Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine now have new and better ways of discovering if a patient’s body is rejecting an organ, and potentially new drugs to target the problem.
Here are their discoveries
- Using powerful genomic analysis, scientists got unprecedented insights into the cells damaging a kidney.
- They were able to locate “clonotypes” of cells that reproduced themselves to mount attacks against the transplanted organ.
- Doctors determined whether a patient was rejecting an organ early and then could treat it.
- They discovered a simple urine test works as well as a biopsy in determining why the body is rejecting an organ.
Tiffany Shi, an MD/PhD student with the Immunology Graduate Program and Medical Scientist Training Program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital was the first author for the research published in JCI, The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
She says, “Using our approach and our data, we could potentially treat patients specifically targeting those cells that are causing the rejection. That way we would prevent the rejection from festering, if you will, and can prevent that rejection episode from potentially happening again.”
E. Steve Woodle, MD and co-director at Children’s Center for Transplant Immunology, describes the research as a roadmap or a blueprint of a bank vault.
“Now we can say, 'OK, there’s plenty of different types of cells in here, what are they doing?' That’s unprecedented,” he says.
The research paper won best abstract in the “People’s Choice” category at the American Transplant Congress. It was selected by the 5,000 attendees.
