Author : Morgan M. Mastrocinque
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 68 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (125 download)
Book Synopsis Epitope-based Re-matching of Donor-recipient Pairs for Kidney Graft Allocation by : Morgan M. Mastrocinque
Download or read book Epitope-based Re-matching of Donor-recipient Pairs for Kidney Graft Allocation written by Morgan M. Mastrocinque and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When considering the matching of donor and recipient pairs for kidney transplantation, there are many aspects that must be compared and evaluated in order to ensure the best outcomes for recipients. Historically, a focus has been placed on evaluating the number of mismatches in various loci of Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLAs) in addition to other clinical factors including blood type, history of disease, etc. While HLA is still a standard technique for determining the histocompatibility of donor-recipient pairs, recent research has shown that other methods such as immunogenicity scores and eplet load may provide a more nuanced approach to donor-recipient matching, resulting in the ability to increase both quantity and quality of kidney transplants that occur. Based on evidence that eplet-based matching may provide improved outcomes for kidney transplant recipients, this thesis develops computational tools, namely a small Python-based library, to aid in the evaluation of this matching methodology and explores data in order to demonstrate computationally the potential impacts of eplet load-based matching when considering race. A secondary evaluation is also made to see how introducing an additional HLA (HLA-DQ) potentially affects re-matching success. Results demonstrate that matching on eplet load yielded an average 8x increase in matches than when using HLA mismatches.