Brendan Lovasik and Andrew Adams Study Selected as Highlight of IXA 2019
OCTOBER 2019
A study presented by first author Brendan Lovasik, MD, general surgery resident on research sabbatical in the transplant immunology lab of senior author and transplant surgeon-scientist Andrew Adams, MD, PhD, was pronounced an official Highlight of the 2019 Annual Congress of the International Xenotransplantation Association (IXA) in Munich, Germany.
The study, which assessed the impact of B cell depletion on pig-to-rhesus-macaque xenograft survival, demonstrated that the combination of low pre-transplant anti-pig antibody and CD4 depletion with and without CD20 depletion resulted in consistent, long-term xenograft survival. The study also advised that further evaluation of the B cell phenotype and the B cell contributions to xenoreactive antibody are crucial for understanding xenograft rejection and pathways for clinical translation of xenotransplantation.