NIH grant to Emory and pediatric partners aims to improve kidney transplants for children

Emory University School of Medicine and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta are teaming up with two university hospitals in California to find new ways to make kidney transplants more tolerable for children.

Emory and Children's will partner with UCLA's Mattel ChildrenÕs Hospital in Los Angeles and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford in Palo Alto for a study of kidney transplants in children.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded the partner institutions a five-year grant totaling approximately $6 million for Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation in Children (CTOT-C).

In the last decade, doctors have been able to refine the regimens of drugs given to transplant patients. Successful transplantation depends on immunosuppressant drugs to prevent tissue rejection, but the drugs bring multiple side effects such as kidney disease and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

"Most anti-rejection drugs were developed in adults and are adapted for children by simply adjusting for weight," says Allan Kirk, MD, PhD, scientific director of the Emory Transplant Center and the study's leader. "But the immune system doesnÕt grow in parallel with a child's weight. The result is that children are often over-immunosuppressed."

Coordinating work among the three university hospitals will allow the study to encompass a group of patients that spans various demographic groups and national origins, says Dr. Kirk, who is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at Emory School of Medicine, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and an attending surgeon at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.

As children mature and are gradually exposed to various environmental stresses, such as viral infections, the set of T cells (white blood cells) they have in their bodies that are able to respond to infections or other outside agents changes.

Part of the CTOT-C program will catalog and define how pediatric kidney transplant patients' T cell repertoires evolve as they get older.