# Assessment of Donor Quality for Improving Kidney Transplant Outcomes

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE · 2020 · $536,174

## Abstract

For most end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients, successful kidney transplantation (KT) provides longer
survival and better quality of life than dialysis. Unfortunately, a consistent balance between organ acceptance
and discard rates after procurement has been difficult to achieve given a lack of precise tools to assess donor
kidney quality and prognosis. Specifically, as recently reported, deceased donor (DD) kidneys retrieved for
transplantation are increasingly being discarded, and the most common reason given for discarding kidneys is
histological biopsy results. Two recent studies suggest that histological evaluation of procurement biopsies are
not predictive of post-transplant outcomes and may lead to dissuade the use of kidneys that are otherwise
suitable for transplant. These findings indicate that additional methods are needed when weighing whether to
transplant a DD kidney. Evaluation of organ quality at transplantation time, as a predictor of graft performance,
is a critical clinical challenge impacting acceptance of an organ, as well as individualization of post-transplant
management. Still, clinical scores and histopathology-based assessments at time of KT have been found to be
poor predictors of post-KT outcomes. Currently, there are no markers that specifically relate to organ biology
that could be included in a donor risk score. A unique matched donor/recipient cohort including 298 DD primary
kidney recipients with 4.1 ± 0.8 years of follow-up, graft biopsies at pre-implantation, post-reperfusion and post-
KT and associated phenotypic data is available for the proposed studies. Also, a matched donor/recipient
cohort of 250 DD primary KT recipients from 3 different institutions is available (approach including training,
validation, and replication sets). Hereby, we hypothesize that the addition of biologically-specific screening for
molecular biomarkers to evaluate DD organ quality and function is more accurate in predicting kidney graft
outcomes than clinical and histopathological-based assessments alone. The specific aims (SA) include:
SA1: Develop a composite score model to evaluate organ quality at kidney transplantation time and predict
short-term outcomes;
SA2: Develop composite score models to predict long-term kidney transplant outcomes; and
SA3: Validate biomarkers predicting short- and long-term outcomes and derive a composite scoring
system for clinical application in a point of care test platform.
The current approach will evaluate clinical applicability and benefit of adding molecular markers to currently
available scoring systems for predicting graft outcomes by (1) accurate assessment of donor organ quality
using a systems biology approach, (2) biomarker/score discovery and validation using a multicenter
retrospective cohort of prospectively evaluated patients with already available outcomes and mRNA profiles,
and (3) independent replication of biomarkers/scores using clinically usable reactions. This study will yie...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10203464
- **Project number:** 7R01DK109581-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE
- **Principal Investigator:** Kellie J. Archer
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $536,174
- **Award type:** 7
- **Project period:** 2017-02-01 → 2022-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10203464

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10203464, Assessment of Donor Quality for Improving Kidney Transplant Outcomes (7R01DK109581-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-28 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10203464. Licensed CC0.

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