Project Leaders:
Paul Keown, Bruce McManus, Robert McMaster, Raymond Ng

Lead Institutions:    
St Paul's Hospital - University of British Columbia; Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI @ VGH) - University of British Columbia

Technology Applications:    
Personalized medicine, diagnostic markers

Research Funding Program:    
Translational Program for Applied Health

The ability to consistently predict the occurrence of immune rejection in organ transplants will drastically increase patient wellbeing and healthcare efficiency.

A team of researchers will use blood biomarkers to develop a much more precise, accurate and sensitive method of detecting rejection in heart, kidney, and liver transplant patients.

A major difficulty in the management of transplant recipients is a lack of accurate and precise tests for predicting or detecting organ rejection by the immune system. Most current methods for detecting graft rejection are either ineffective and inaccurate or highly invasive and risky, such as tissue biopsies.

The Biomarkers in Transplantation team will use advanced genomic, proteomic, metabolomic and informatics tools to assess the effectiveness of new biomarker tests. These tests will involve looking at the differential expression pattern of genes, proteins and metabolites in patients with or without organ rejection to determine which biomarkers are most effective in indicating early and late tissue organ rejection.

After organ transplantation of a heart, kidney, or liver, the patient’s immune system may attack the foreign organ. In order to prevent rejection, patients are treated with immunosuppressant medication. These drugs can make the individual susceptible to other diseases or damage the transplanted organ itself. Reducing the need for immunosuppressant medication will drastically improve the overall effectiveness of heart, kidney and liver transplants.

Some biomarkers have been tested in an initial patient cohort. A larger trial of patients at multiple sites is necessary to provide statistically significant results that validate the use of biomarkers as predictive tests, which will allow implementation of tests in clinics worldwide.