2010-2011

There has been an expansion of living kidney donation in Canada with the National Living Donor Kidney Exchange Program. However the quality of life after non-directed living kidney donation (paired exchange or anonymous kidney donation) is not well established. We hypothesize that quality of life after non-directed is equivalent to that after directed living kidney donation. We anticipate that there will be no quality of life differences between directed and non-directed giving additional evidence to support further expansion of non-directed living kidney donation which in turn would potentially reduce the prolonged waiting time for deceased donor kidney transplantation in British Columbia.

We have detected an increase in enzymes in patients experiencing chronic rejection following heart transplantation. We propose to investigate the consequences of these increased enzymes in the context of inflammation and wound repair. We hypothesize that increased enzymes lead to impaired wound healing.

We are studying how a type of white blood cell, known as a T regulatory cell, or Treg, can be used as a new way to control how the patient’s immune system responds to a foreign organ. We think that by increasing the numbers of Tregs in transplanted patients will be a new way to prevent organ rejection that will not come with the side effects of the immunosuppressive drugs that are currently used. In this proposal we aim to develop a new way to make Tregs that will specifically control immunity to transplanted organs without impacting any other aspects of the patient’s immune system. If successful, this approach would represent a major step towards implementing the use of Tregs as a novel cell-based therapy to improve the long-term success of organ transplantation.