Personalizing Medicine in Organ Transplantation

Maarten Naesens­­, University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

The talk will review the importance of personalized medicine in organ transplantation and will highlight how to follow a generalized process in biomarker discovery for personalized medicine: collecting and storing samples for data analysis; compiling and understanding the mass of data from samples; and translating the research findings into clinical practice. The problems with the age-old strategies in diagnosing allograft dysfunction has led to the use of the genome, proteome and metabolome, in concert with clinical data, for –omics approaches in predicting and diagnosing disease.

New molecular and biomarker discovery efforts for transplant injury in relation to the graft, peripheral blood and urine can begin to highlight the ongoing importance of pathology as an important means to stratify treatment choices for different mechanisms of transplant injury. The challenge is now to apply these fantastic advances in technology to clinical applications.