​A transplant is the leading treatment for terminal-stage kidney failure. It could soon be possible to predict a patient's risk of rejecting the transplant before surgery by analyzing certain biomarkers. The EU Biomargin project, which was completed in 2018, was set up with the goal of identifying and testing biomarkers to assess the risk of the three most common types of rejection: humoral immunity, cellular immunity, and fibrosis and atrophy of the transplanted organ's blood vessels. 

List, a CEA Tech institute, was one of the thirteen partners involved in the project. List researchers analyzed several types of biological data (messenger RNA, proteins, metabolites, and lipids) generated using several measurement techniques on biopsy, urine, and blood samples taken from a group of patients. Based on the analysis, around ten markers of interest were selected from among several thousand and original biological signatures were identified to predict the risk of rejection using statistical models developed specifically for this purpose.

The assessment of the multiomic* biomarkers' capacity to predict rejection revealed better performance than predictions made based on isolated biomarkers. The approach will now be tested on a larger cohort of patients and will perhaps ultimately be used by doctors to make better-informed decisions.

*based on different kinds of measurements (transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, lipidome, etc.)