In early December, Scott Palmer, MD, MHS, associate professor of medicine (Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine) and Kent Weinhold, PhD, professor of surgery and immunology, convened the Duke Solid Organ Transplant Translational Research Interdisciplinary Colloquium.
Forty Duke faculty, staff, fellows, and postdoctoral scholars – including clinicians and research scientists from the Departments of Medicine and Surgery, as well as Immunology, Pediatrics, Pathology Clinical Services and DTRI – joined them for the event, which was funded through the School of Medicine Interdisciplinary Colloquia Program and received logisitical support from the Duke Translational Research Institute.
Their goal: to catalyze the formation of new multidisciplinary teams of investigators to address challenges and opportunities in solid organ transplant medicine.
From a summary of the meeting:
Despite the growth in advanced organ failure and increasing utilization of solid organ transplant as a treatment for organ failure, transplant remains an imperfect solution. In most organs chronic graft failure, immunosuppressive toxicity, and opportunistic infection remain common problems that limit long-term graft survival and impair recipient quality of life. More effective diagnostic, therapeutic interventions are needed as well as increased translation of results from basic models into the clinical patient care arena. Collaborative multidisciplinary groups of investigators are needed to solve these problems. Duke, with strengths across multiple organs and multiple areas of translational science, is well positioned to address these issues and secure NIH funding.Eight project teams provided updates on their current research in solid organ transplant with focus on heart, lung, kidney, small bowel, composite tissue allotransplantation and geriatric considerations. Four core resources – proteomics, immune profiling, genomics, and biobanking – provided a brief overview of services with examples applied to solid organ transplant. While there were many specific research questions and suggestions (e.g. alternative delivery methods for targeted immunosuppression, barriers to delivery of microRNA in clinical trials, etc.), there were also discussions of where infrastructure support has been helpful and where additional support could be useful. For example, Louise Markert, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics, highlighted the infrastructure support that is allowing the thymus processing to move out of her lab into a Good Manufacturing Practice facility, thereby opening access to other investigators with interest in this area. One example of where additional infrastructure support would be helpful is to create a database of clinical outcomes in older transplant patients to predict which patients would do well or not. Another suggestion was to work with the institution to establish a cost-effective way to extract data from Maestro Care needed for research. The retreat sparked research ideas, but diligent follow-up will be required to sustain the momentum and identify projects and cores to submit as part of one or more Program Project Grants. Dr. Palmer and Dr. Weinhold will propose the establishment of a Steering Committee to guide the future of solid organ transplant translational research at Duke.