Arianna Barbetta, MD PhD

American Liver Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Award
$25,000 over one year

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Immune predictors of antibody mediated rejection in pediatric liver transplant recipients

Mentor: Juliet Emamaullee, MD PhD

Acute rejection is the process of destroying transplanted organ mediated by immune cells. Pediatric recipients of liver transplantation are at high risk of liver graft rejection, which has detrimental effects on the organ function and longevity, and ultimately on patient outcomes. There are barriers in diagnosis and treatment of liver rejection due to limited knowledge regarding this disease. Additionally, there are no biomarkers that can help to make diagnosis of rejection without the need to perform an invasive liver biopsy. This project aims to highly characterize the immune cell populations involved during a rejection episode and monitor them after rejection treatment, with the goal of increasing the understanding of the mechanism behind liver rejection. This will allow identification of cell population responsible of liver rejection that can be used as new target for therapies to treat and prevent rejection. This project will also analyze the type of proteins contained in the plasma of children with liver rejection. This will lead to the identification of non-invasive biomarkers of rejection, which can be used in the clinical practice to monitor liver graft function and avoid biopsies in children recipients of liver transplants.