News & Events: Transplant Monitoring

Noninvasive Test More Than 95 Percent Accurate, UCSF Researchers Say A simple urine test can diagnose and predict acute rejection in kidney transplants, leading to an opportunity for earlier detection and treatment, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco.  A test of 601 urine samples showed greater than 95 percent accuracy in determining the risk of rejection following transplant, the researchers said. Their work already has led to the spinoff Bay Area company NephroSant, which plans to launch its first noninvasive test for detecting kidney rejection in the near [...]

UCSF Researchers Recommend Creation of National Donor Registry While organ transplant recipients receive continual care as the end-stage treatment to their condition, attention also should be given to living donors, who can suffer from hypertension, diabetes and other disorders after donation, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.  As reported online April 12, 2019, in JAMA Network Open, by aggregating data from publicly available clinical studies, the researchers found that nearly one in seven kidney donors experienced a potentially adverse event that may be related to [...]

UCLA, UCSF and City of Hope have received a five-year, $8 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study how a common virus called cytomegalovirus may provoke the immune system to reject transplanted kidneys. Minnie M. Sarwal M.D., Ph.D., FRCP, DCH, professor and director of Precision Transplant Medicine in the UCSF Department of Surgery, is co-leader and principal investigator on the grant, which will investigate how a common virus called cytomegalovirus (CMV) may provoke the immune system to reject transplanted kidneys. Sarwal is an internationally [...]

Natera, a genetic testing and diagnostics company with proprietary bioinformatics and molecular technology, has announced that it has formed a collaboration with the Sarwal Lab at University of California San Francisco to study DNA markers of kidney transplant rejection.The Sarwal Lab has been focused on using precision medicine techniques to better diagnose and predict acute rejection (AR) in kidney transplants, a finding that eventually could replace the need for biopsies and lead to earlier detection of AR and treatment. Principal investigators in the lab include Lab Director Minnie [...]

Joshua Y. Yang, B.S., Michael C. Nasr, B.S., and Tyler Schmeckpeper B.S., Master of Translational Medicine (MTM), graduate student researchers in the Sarwal Lab, were recently invited to attend the 9th annual Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) 2016 at UC Berkeley on April 1-3, 2016, and selected as presenters to disucss their work. The MTM program, a cross-campus collaboration between two University of California campuses—San Francisco and Berkeley, and launched with the help of CTSI, is among the first educational programs of its kind aimed at accelerating the translation of [...]

International Innovation, an online forum for the communication and dissemination of cutting-edge research, recently reported on the pioneering efforts of the Sarwal Lab to develop novel translational approaches for improving the management of kidney transplant patients and treating renal disease. The article reports on the lab's breakthrough assays, the kidney solid organ rejection test (kSORT) and the kidney spontaneous operational tolerance test (kSPOT), and their potential to revolutionize the way kidney transplant patients are managed after transplantation by predicting acute [...]

Nature Reviews Nephrology recently reported on the Sarwal Lab's research elucidating the role of AECAs in graft rejection: Evidence from clinical studies has implicated non-HLA anti-endothelial cell antibodies (AECAs) in transplant rejection. However, the pathogenic mechanisms by whch these antibodies might contribute to renal allograft dysfunction are not well understood. Now, new data from Annette Jackson, Minnie Sarwal (pictured right) and colleagues suggest that AECAs activate the vascular endothelium, resulting in inflammation and microvascular injury", as reported in Research [...]

UCSF News reports on research led by Minnie Sarwal, MD, PhD, Director of the Sarwal Lab, in developing a  test for diagnosing and predicting acute rejection (AR) in kidney transplants, a finding that eventually could replace the need for biopsies and lead to earlier detection of AR and treatment. 'We have found a set of genes in blood that pick up inflammation and acute rejection in different solid organ transplants and thus can replace the need for an invasive biopsy in the future,' said senior author Minnie Sarwal, MD, PhD, Professor of Transplant Surgery at UCSF. 'This assay also [...]

Dr. Minnie Sarwal discusses the omics approach to transplant monitoring and the potential use of sensitive and effective biomarkers for diagnosiing and treating disease. Rapid progress in high throughput molecular screening and in bioinformatics tools have provided the scientific community with new tools for conducting basic and clinical research.