Researchers at St. Paul’s Hospital and Vancouver General Hospital are developing a revolutionary new test to diagnose and facilitate treatment of organ rejection in transplant patients.

Patients with end-stage vital organ failure depend on transplantation, but the process has its remaining challenges. Immune cells that normally protect patients can cause rejection and destruction of the very organ intended to save their life. To test for rejection, patients must undergo uncomfortable and invasive biopsies. Patients must also take drugs that inhibit rejection by suppressing the immune response, and which can have serious side effects.

Project researchers seek to define which biomarkers—for example, substances found in the blood or other body fluids¾can be used as a diagnostic and prognostic test for organ rejection and immunosuppressive therapy response. Being able to monitor and predict rejection using a simple blood test will significantly reduce intrusive and expensive diagnostic procedures.

“These new tools are critical in order to produce an affordable, accurate, and widely useful test to determine whether rejection is occurring and how a patient’s transplanted organ is faring,” says Dr. Rob McMaster, project co-lead, Director of the Immunity and Infection Research Centre at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, and Director of Transplant Immunology Research for the BC Transplant Society.

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