New to MyHealth?
Manage Your Care From Anywhere.
Access your health information from any device with MyHealth. You can message your clinic, view lab results, schedule an appointment, and pay your bill.
ALREADY HAVE AN ACCESS CODE?
DON'T HAVE AN ACCESS CODE?
NEED MORE DETAILS?
MyHealth for Mobile
Abstract
Organ transplant recipients face life-long immunosuppression and consequently are at high risk of comorbidities. Occasionally, kidney transplant recipients develop a state of targeted immune quiescence (operational tolerance) against an HLA-mismatched graft, allowing them to withdraw all immunosuppression and retain stable graft function while resuming immune responses to third-party antigens. Methods to better understand and monitor this state of alloimmune quiescence by transcriptional profiling may reveal a gene signature that identifies patients for whom immunosuppression could be titrated to reduce patient and graft morbidities. Therefore, we investigated 571 unique peripheral blood samples from 348 HLA-mismatched renal transplant recipients and 101 nontransplant controls in a four-stage study including microarray, quantitative PCR, and flow cytometry analyses. We report a refined and highly validated (area under the curve, 0.95; 95% confidence interval, 0.92 to 0.97) peripheral blood three-gene assay (KLF6, BNC2, CYP1B1) to detect the state of operational tolerance by quantitative PCR. The frequency of predicted alloimmune quiescence in stable renal transplant patients receiving long-term immunosuppression (n=150) was 7.3% by the three-gene assay. Targeted cell sorting of peripheral blood from operationally tolerant patients showed a significant shift in the ratio of circulating monocyte-derived dendritic cells with significantly different expression of the genes constituting the three-gene assay. Our results suggest that incorporation of patient screening by specific cellular and gene expression assays may support the safety of drug minimization trials and protocols.
View details for DOI 10.1681/ASN.2013111239
View details for Web of Science ID 000358895100028
View details for PubMedID 25429124
View details for PubMedCentralID PMC4520154