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Research & Development Request

EUROSTARS2-project consortium for developing a kidney transplant immune monitoring system seeks partner

Country of Origin: Spain
Reference Number: RDES20210111001
Publication Date: 11 January 2021

Summary

Basque SME from the north of Spain wishes to complete a consortium with a partner from the health sector (clinicians) who have access to kidney biopsies and kidney transplant biopsies. The objective is the development of a clinical analytic system, which enables new and better strategies for immune monitoring in kidney transplant recipients.

Description

The control of immune system after a transplant is crucial to ensure the survival not only of the graft but also of the transplant patient.



The advances in immunosuppression, histocompatibility and surgical techniques have been responsible for the success achieved in the kidney transplant at early-term post-transplantation. However, the risk of graft loss remains very high in the medium and long-term (50% in the tenth-year post-transplantation). The chronic humoral rejection is commonly associated to this graft loss, being donor-specific anti-HLA (DSA) antibodies a risk factor generally accepted. 

Histocompatibility laboratories routinely used assays based on these biomarkers to monitor the immune system in transplant patient. In spite of the great sensitivity of DSA (donor specific antibodies) detection, 60% of kidney graft losses present antibody-mediated tissue injury, indicating the importance of non-DSA antibodies. These non-DSA reactive antibodies recognize specific epitopes of the graft cell membranes and proteins promoting the immune response against the graft. However, histocompatibility laboratories still lack a specific tool that enables the non-DSA reactive antibodies monitoring, mainly due to the inherent difficulties and limitations to work with the samples required. 



In order to address this need, the consortium proposes the development of a new system that allows the identification of DSA and non-DSA reactive antibodies against the graft in the serum of transplant patients. 



The role of the partners sought sticks mainly to sample collection-processing, immune monitoring benchmarking and experimental results validation.



Call deadline: 4th February 2021

EOI deadline: 25th January 2021

Project duration: 3 years

Advantages and Innovations

•	Easier and simpler immune monitoring in transplant patients.

Early detection of rejection episodes

•	Adjustment of medical doses leading to less toxicity and derived pathologies as neoplasia

•	Higher cost-effectiveness ratios of transplant surgery as well as patients’ life expectancy and quality

Expertise sought

Partner should have expertise in kidney transplant donor/recipient immune system compatibility and immune monitoring approaches after transplantation.

Experience in immune monitoring of patients is highly desired, as the tasks assigned in the project will range from sample/biopsies acquisition and proccessing, to validation and benchmarking of immune monitoring results obtained in the project vs conventional/existing techniques.

Stage Of Development

Concept stage

Stage Of Development Comment

The project is at is concept stage, with prototypes at TRL (technology readiness level) 6-7.  The technology in which it is supported is fully tested and reliable. Time to market will be within 24 months after project completion.

The proposal and project organization is also at its final stage regarding milestones, work packages and tasks definition.

Requested partner

The partner sought could be an SME, a university or a hospital with access and authorization to manipulate (for research activities) human kidney transplant biopsies.



Experience in immune monitoring of patients is highly desired, as the tasks assigned in the project will range from sample/biopsies acquisition and processing, to validation and benchmarking of immune monitoring results obtained in the project vs conventional/existing techniques.



Tasks: sample acquisition and processing, immune monitoring benchmarking and experimental results validation