Dr Sherwood's project proposal titled "Clinical FlowPRT – Detecting HLA specific T cells using single antigen beads" was granted $75.000 by VCHRI.
While transplant survival has greatly improved in recent years, acute and chronic rejection remains a major cause of graft loss. Alloimmune T cells are the main driver of these rejections, resulting in increased efforts to identify these cells. Although several commercial products have been developed to screen donor serum for donor-specific antibodies, no such investigative procedure is currently available to identify donor-specific T cells.
Sherwood’s study will repurpose an existing assay for human leukocyte antigen (HLA) antibody screening to detect HLA-specific T cells using single antigen beads. These specificities can then be compared with potential donor HLA typings to avoid donor-recipient pairings that lead to donor-specific alloreactive T cells.
If successful, the assay could be moved into a clinical setting to help reduce the incidences of rejection by decreasing the number of potentially dangerous patient-donor pairings, as well as through more precise monitoring of the reproduction of alloreactive T cell clones.
The project will commence July 1, 2024, and run for 24 months until end June, 2026. Dr Karen Sherwood is the Principal Investigator for the project, while Franz Fenninger, James Lan, Paul Keown and John Gill provide research support as co-investigators.
This project is supported by a VCHRI Innovation and Translational Research Award funded by VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation. The VCHRI announcement can be found here.
Dr. Karen Sherwood