New research from investigators at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center may have uncovered a method to further protect heart transplant patients and lower the rate of rejection by providing patients with an anti-inflammatory antibody prior to surgery. The results of the team’s mouse study, published in the journal PNAS, focused…

Gigi Chambers has had a lot to contend with as a patient—she’s beaten cancer twice, including stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and then twenty years later was diagnosed with heart failure and received a transplant. But nothing has been more dreadful and uncomfortable than the post-transplant heart biopsies checking for graft…

With organ transplant rejection rates as high as 50% depending on the type of organ, there is a vital need for the development of more effective therapies to prevent the activation of the body’s immune response. Now, researchers at Houston Methodist Hospital say they have identified a subset of CD4+…

Research led by investigators at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine has revealed new, specific biomarkers of kidney transplant rejection. These specific cellular signals, revealed by single-cell analysis represent new therapeutic and diagnostic targets to improve care for the roughly 10% of patients…

Over time, it’s common for the body’s immune system to slowly and persistently degrade a transplanted kidney. The result is loss of function and, in the worst case, rejection. Up to one-third of kidney recipients lose the organ within ten years after transplantation. Unfortunately, early biomarkers of kidney transplant rejection…

Precision medicine transplant care specialist CareDx and genomic diagnostics company Veracyte announced today an exclusive agreement to commercialize CAreDx’s organ transplant-rejection tests on Veracyte’s diagnostic platform, the nCounter FLEX Analysis System. CareDx said its HistoMap gene expression profiling test, that it announced last year is under development, will run on…

Memory—a key feature of the adaptive immune system—is evident in the innate immune system, too. But it has been unclear whether memory in the innate immune system is specific to previously encountered antigens. Now it appears that antigen-specific memory is in fact an attribute of the innate immune system’s monocytes…

Non-invasive diagnostics maker CareDx, which focuses on early detection of organ rejection in kidney and heart transplant patients, announced its blood-based test AlloSure has received a positive draft Local Coverage Determination (dLCD) for Medicare coverage in both kidney and heart transplant patients. The coverage decision was issued by Palmetto GBA,…

A multicenter study led by investigators from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai recently identified an array of biomarkers that could help predict whether a transplanted kidney will later develop fibrosis—a panel of disorders which can cause the organ to fail. The findings from the new study—“Biopsy transcriptome…

Researchers at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and the University of South Australia have discovered that a dual combination of standard transplant anti-rejection drugs with immunotherapy can eradicate cancer cells in a quarter of transplant patients while also protecting their new organ. “Cancer is a leading cause of death in kidney…

Researchers have developed a blood test to detect acute heart transplant rejection, a potentially deadly condition that occurs in the early months after a patient has received a donor heart. Typically, these patients must undergo endomyocardial biopsy (EMBx) to monitor for acute rejection. But EMBx is an invasive procedure and…

A recently-discovered genomic signature for predicting acute rejection in liver transplant (LT) recipients will be detailed May 2, during a presentation at the American Transplant Congress (ATC) in Chicago. Josh Levitsky, M.D., professor of medicine (gastroenterology, hepatology) and surgery (organ transplantation) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, will present results from…

An unhealthy balance of gut microbes is associated with an elevated risk of death among people who have received a donor organ, study findings suggest. The findings contribute to understanding the relationship between the gut microbiome and long-term health. Specifically, the study showed a heightened risk of death from cancer…

Vaccines such as the combined measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) shot and the vaccine against the chicken pox varicella-zoster virus (VZV) are safe and generate a good immune response in children with liver and/or kidney transplants, shows research led by the Children’s Hospital Colorado. “This shifts the paradigm of the approach to protecting…

A tiny bioelectronic device surgically placed upon a transplanted kidney can detect warning signs of organ rejection up to three weeks earlier than current methods, a study in rats suggests. The wireless technology, which is smaller than a fingernail and about the width of a human hair, uses thermal changes…