New Insights Into And Interventions Of The Persistent Immune Responses In Chronic Graft Rejection 2nd Edition

Publisher’s note: This is a 2nd edition due to an article retraction.

Organ transplantation is a life-saving surgical procedure through which the functionality of a failing organ system can be restored. However, without the life-long administration of immunosuppressive drugs, the recipient’s immune system will launch a massive immune attack that will ultimately destroy the graft. Although successful at protecting the graft from an immune attack, long-term use of immunosuppressive drugs leads to serious complications (e.g., increased risk of infection, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and cancer). Moreover, recipients suffer from limited long-term graft survival rates due to the inability of current treatments to establish tolerance to the transplanted tissues. Thus, there is a great medical need to understand the complex network of immune system interactions that lead to transplant rejection so that new strategies of intervention can be determined that will redirect the system toward transplant acceptance while preserving immune competence against offending agents. In the past 20 years, the discovery and growing understanding of the positive and negative regulators of the activation of the immune system have fostered new interventional procedures targeting one or the other. While pre-clinical results proved the validity of these strategies, their clinical implementation has been troublesome. These results underscore the need for additional methods to determine the most effective interventions to prevent long-term transplant rejection. New tools of genomics, proteomics and metabolomics are being implemented in powerful analyses that promise the development of better, safer personalized treatments. In parallel, theoretical modeling has emerged as a tool that transcends investigations of individual mechanistic processes and instead unravels the relevant mechanisms of complex systems such as the immune response triggered by a transplant. In this way, theoretical models can be used to identify important behavior that arises from complex systems and thereby delineate emergent properties of biological systems that could not be identified studying single components. Employing this approach, interdisciplinary collaborations among immunologists, mathematicians, and system biologists will yield novel perspectives in the development of more effective strategies of intervention. The aim of this Research Topic is to demonstrate how new insight and methods from theoretical and experimental studies of the immune response can aid in identifying new research directions in transplant immunology. First, techniques from various theoretical and experimental studies with applications to the immune response will be reviewed to determine how they can be adapted to explore the complexity of transplant rejection. Second, recent advances in the acquisition and mining of large data sets related to transplant genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics will be discussed in the context of their predictive power and potential for optimizing and personalizing patient treatment. Last, new perspectives will be offered on the integration of computational immune modeling with transplant and omics data to establish more effective strategies of intervention that promote transplant tolerance.

Organ transplantation is a life-saving surgical procedure through which the functionality of a failing organ system can be restored. However, without the life-long administration of immunosuppressive drugs, the recipient's immune system will launch a massive immune attack that will ultimately destroy the graft. Although successful at protecting the graft from an immune attack, long-term use of immunosuppressive drugs leads to serious complications (e.g., increased risk of infection, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and cancer). Moreover, recipients suffer from limited long-term graft survival rates due to the inability of current treatments to establish tolerance to the transplanted tissues. Thus, there is a great medical need to understand the complex network of immune system interactions that lead to transplant rejection so that new strategies of intervention can be determined that will redirect the system toward transplant acceptance while preserving immune competence against offending agents. In the past 20 years, the discovery and growing understanding of the positive and negative regulators of the activation of the immune system have fostered new interventional procedures targeting one or the other. While pre-clinical results proved the validity of these strategies, their clinical implementation has been troublesome. These results underscore the need for additional methods to determine the most effective interventions to prevent long-term transplant rejection. New tools of genomics, proteomics and metabolomics are being implemented in powerful analyses that promise the development of better, safer personalized treatments. In parallel, theoretical modeling has emerged as a tool that transcends investigations of individual mechanistic processes and instead unravels the relevant mechanisms of complex systems such as the immune response triggered by a transplant. In this way, theoretical models can be used to identify important behavior that arises from complex systems and thereby delineate emergent properties of biological systems that could not be identified studying single components. Employing this approach, interdisciplinary collaborations among immunologists, mathematicians, and system biologists will yield novel perspectives in the development of more effective strategies of intervention. The aim of this Research Topic is to demonstrate how new insight and methods from theoretical and experimental studies of the immune response can aid in identifying new research directions in transplant immunology. First, techniques from various theoretical and experimental studies with applications to the immune response will be reviewed to determine how they can be adapted to explore the complexity of transplant rejection. Second, recent advances in the acquisition and mining of large data sets related to transplant genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics will be discussed in the context of their predictive power and potential for optimizing and personalizing patient treatment. Last, new perspectives will be offered on the integration of computational immune modeling with transplant and omics data to establish more effective strategies of intervention that promote transplant tolerance.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This textbook, endorsed by the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT), provides adult and paediatric nurses with a full and informative guide covering all aspects of transplant nursing, from basic principles to advanced concepts. It takes the reader on a journey through the history of transplant nursing, including essential and progressive elements to help nurses improve their knowledge and benefit the patient experience, as well as a comprehensive introduction to research and auditing methods. This new volume specifically intended for nurses, complements the ESH-EBMT reference title, a popular educational resource originally developed in 2003 for physicians to accompany an annual training course also serving as an educational tool in its own right. This title is designed to develop the knowledge of nurses in transplantation. It is the first book of its kind specifically targeted at nurses in this specialist field and acknowledges the valuable contribution that nursing makes in this area. This volume presents information that is essential for the education of nurses new to transplantation, while also offering a valuable resource for more experienced nurses who wish to update their knowledge.

Topic Editor MS received funding from Bayer AG.

The Novartis Foundation Series is a popular collection of the proceedings from Novartis Foundation Symposia, in which groups of leading scientists from a range of topics across biology, chemistry and medicine assembled to present papers and discuss results. The Novartis Foundation, originally known as the Ciba Foundation, is well known to scientists and clinicians around the world.