Paul I. Terasaki Foundation Laboratory

POST-TRANSPLANT ANTIBODY AND CHRONIC REJECTION NEWSLETTER NO. 3. July 2007

Of the 69 participating centers of the workshop project, 7 centers have submitted their registered patients thus far, and this adds up to 1,348 patients, which include 1,305 kidneys, 37 Kidney/Pancreas, 3 pancreas, 66 heart, and 16 lung patients. These centers should have received the antibody screening kits by now, but if you have not, please let us know. We congratulate 3 centers who have already finished antibody testing and sent in their results. Single Antigen kits will be sent to these centers soon for specificity analysis.

We hope that other centers are also making progress in collecting patient sera. We have decided that there is no deadline for sera collection, as this study will continue on after the Brazil Workshop, however, if you would like your results to be included in the 15th Workshop Report next year, we encourage you to send in your patient list by mid August and antibody data by October. We will need one-year follow-up by the Workshop next year. We especially hope to see more heart, lung, and liver patients enrolled in the study. With this collaboration, we can show whether the strong association of post-tx antibodies and chronic rejection seen in kidney in the 13th and 14th WS studies is also true for heart, lung, and liver.

As for kidney and kidney/pancreas, the 15th WS study will focus on the antibody specificity (DSA or NDSA), and most importantly, whether these antibodies can be removed. Increasing the current drug in patients who test positive to antibodies will be the first attempt.