Celebrated kidney transplant expert Philip Halloran likes to joke that he publishes his research regularly in the prestigious scientific journal Nature — that is, once every 51 years.
The first paper, published in 1974, reported on a breakthrough in our understanding of why an estimated 50 per cent of recipients reject the transplant, leading to organ failure.
The second, published just last month, offers a remedy to that rejection process, representing a career's worth of clinical observation and scientific inquiry, with many successes, failures and a few serendipitous discoveries along the way.
The newest paper follows a randomized controlled trial for felzartamab, a newly developed drug that suppresses a process now known as antibody-mediated rejection (ABMR), which is the culprit behind about half of all transplanted kidney failures.
Researchers in Vienna, Berlin and Edmonton, led at the University of Alberta by Halloran and his team, examined biopsies at the molecular level from 10 patients treated with the drug and 10 placebo patients at the pre-treatment, end-of-treatment (six months) and post-treatment stages (six months later).
All patients with active rejection who took the drug showed suppression of the rejection activity. The treated group also showed less damage to their kidney tissue than the placebo group, even after treatment was stopped, suggesting the drug could delay organ failure.
