Analyzing Lung Graft Rejection to Increase Tolerance

Lung transplant is a life-saving option for terminal lung disease, but historically lung transplant recipients have had the highest rates of allograft failure and mortality of all solid organ transplants. Our lab is committed to applying innovative research methods, including single cell sequencing, to help understand the mechanisms of lung transplant rejection, and to lay the groundwork for the discovery of novel therapeutics to facilitate graft tolerance.

We have developed an innovative platform to dissociate single cells from bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and transbronchial lung biopsies and sequence the cells at Cincinnati Children's using technology from 10X Genomics, enabling transcriptional profiling of thousands of single cells from small amounts of tissue, along with TCR and BCR sequences associated with T and B cells. This has allowed us to examine the gene expression changes associated with allograft rejection at single cell resolution, providing insights into differential gene expression, clonal diversity of TCR/BCR, cell signaling, and cell composition analysis, among other insights.