Joseph Turek
Duke University, NC·Microbiology & Immunology
Heart transplants save lives, but recipients must take immune-suppressing drugs for life. These drugs leave patients at risk of serious infection, chronic rejection and organ damage.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
heart transplantation
transplant tolerance
central tolerance
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Assess the safety and effectiveness of cultured thymus tissue implantation (CTTI) for inducing tolerance to a heart from the same donor in young miniature swine, including the conditioning needed and the fate of implanted thymus slices.
- Determine whether thymus tissue from young adult donor pigs can rebuild a functional immune system and produce tolerance after CTTI, testing the effect of donor age.
- Compare gene expression in pig and human thymus tissue to build evidence-based age criteria that could expand the human thymus donor pool to match potential heart donors.
More about the research
A better solution would be tolerance: training the recipient's immune system to accept the donor heart as its own. This project proposes to do that through the thymus, the organ where T cells (immune cells that can attack the transplant) learn which tissues not to attack. The idea is to implant thymus tissue from the same donor as the heart.
Why it matters
If tolerance can be reliably induced, heart transplant recipients could need far less lifelong immunosuppression. This could reduce infections, chronic rejection and organ failure, and improve survival of both the graft and the patient. The authors note the approach could apply to recipients of other organ types and could be combined with other tolerance therapies. Defining donor age criteria could widen the pool of usable thymus donors.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Laura Hale
University of Arizona, AZ·Microbiology & Immunology
Define, characterize and supply panels of human thymus and lymph node tissue from donors of defined age and sex, drawn from the DHVI Human Thymus Biobank (890+ donors aged 1 day to 78 years), to meet each research project's verification needs.
Ali Naji
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether stringent B cell depletion with CD20-targeted CAR T cells lets B cells regrow tolerant of a transplanted kidney in cynomolgus macaques, and analyze resulting B and T cell alloimmunity at cellular and molecular levels.
Kristin A. Hogquist
University of Minnesota, MN·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether interferon made in the thymus trains developing T cells to tolerate self-antigens that are switched on by interferon, as happens during inflammation.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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