Team led by UCLA, UCSF receives $8 million to study virus that often strikes after kidney transplants

UCLA, UC San Francisco 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.The 14-member interdisciplinary team is co-led by Elaine Reed, who holds the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Endowed Chair in Diagnostic Medicine at UCLA and is director of the UCLA Immunogenetics Center.  “Nearly 70 percent of people around the world carry antibodies to the cytomegalovirus infection, yet healthy people rarely display symptoms,” said Reed, who also is a professor of pathology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “In a transplant patient, however, CMV is one of the lea ding causes of organ failure and death.”In 2016, U.S. medical centers performed  33,611 transplants, including 19,062 for kidneys, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. An estimated 15 percent of kidney transplant patients develop CMV infections following surgery.“We intend to translate our discoveries into improved care and life-saving treatments for transplant patients who are predisposed to CMV infection,” Reed said.To identify new strategies for treating kidney transplant patients with CMV, the consortium will study two types of immune responses.The first type, innate immune response, is a general inflammatory reaction that provides the first line of defense against infections by clearing disea...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news