NIH awards Penn Medicine $14 million grant to promote kidney transplantation
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Penn Medicine received a 7-year, $14 million grant from the NIH to use chimeric antigen receptor T-cell immunotherapies to match patients in need of kidney transplants, according to a press release.
“Engineering novel cellular immunotherapies to help improve access to kidney transplants is an exciting area of research for a unique patient population in great need of lifesaving organs,” Ali Naji, MD, PhD, the J. William White Professor of Surgical Research in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said in the release. “We’re committed to discovering an approach to help these currently transplant-ineligible end-stage renal disease patients find a path forward to an organ match.”
Along with a team of Penn Medicine researchers, Naji will launch a clinical trial in 2022 using CAR T cells in patients who cannot find a kidney transplant match due to “pre-existing antibodies against potential donors.” Two experimental CAR T cell therapies will be used to achieve a compatible kidney match by removing immune B cells and plasma cells in patients.
“CAR T cells represent a powerful and specific therapy targeting immune cells that produce antibodies that preclude successful transplantation,” Carl H. June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center, said in the release. “By combining two CAR T therapies targeting antigens that are found on B cell and plasma cells, we hope to achieve successful kidney transplantation in patients with pre-existing antibodies.”
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