# Immunologic Biomarkers of Rejection in Clinical Liver Transplantation

> **NIH NIH K08** · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA · 2022 · $266,870

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Candidate: Juliet Emamaullee is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Southern
California (USC) and an attending liver and kidney transplant surgeon at Keck Hospital and Children’s Hospital-
Los Angeles. Dr. Emamaullee has been working with her proposed K08 mentor, Dr. Omid Akbari, and her co-
mentor, Dr. Shahab Asgharzadeh, to learn about mass cytometry approaches to characterize immune responses
and now has begun independent work to develop these techniques to analyze the process of rejection in liver
transplant (LT) recipients. The project aims to provide her with additional skills and knowledge required to
achieve her long-term goal of studying the immunologic mechanisms involved in development and progression
of LT rejection in order to develop new diagnostic, preventative, and therapeutic approaches to improve post-LT
outcomes.
Career Development Plan: Dr. Emamaullee has strategically planned to gain the necessary training and
mentoring that will be required for her successful transition to being an independent investigator through select
coursework and a robust mentoring plan. She has also organized an advisory committee composed not only of
leaders in the field but also those able to directly impact her career advancement. The immediate training
objectives are focused on consolidating her expertise in: (1) advanced immunological techniques including mass
cytometry; (2) bioinformatics and data analysis; and (3) immunological pathways of rejection in clinical LT. This
will not only ensure that Dr. Emamaullee's research project progresses as planned but will also ensure her
progress will be recognized through promotion and obtaining independent research funding. She has an
impactful, unique research project that is sufficiently different from her mentor's research to avoid competition or
overlap.
Research Plan: The proposed study leverages the extensive resources available at USC to address an important
public health issue, which makes it directly relevant to the NIH mission. Hepatocellular carcinoma is on pace to
become the leading global indication for LT, and rejection continues to be an important cause of graft loss and
failure post-transplant. The diagnosis of rejection is not correlative to changes in liver blood tests and thus
requires an invasive biopsy. Recently, there have been significant advances in the sensitivity of techniques to
characterize immune responses, even in small tissue samples. We hypothesize that a liver-focused immune
panel can be developed using imaging mass cytometry (IMC) to deeply analyze intrahepatic immune infiltrates
in human liver tissue. We also hypothesize that graft-infiltrating lymphocytes can be characterized using IMC to
better understand which subpopulations mediate allograft rejection in LT. First, we will develop a Liver
Immunology IMC Panel using tissue obtained from LT patients with chronic rejection. Furthermore, we will utilize
this assay to characteri...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10412948
- **Project number:** 5K08CA245220-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Juliet Emamaullee
- **Activity code:** K08 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $266,870
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-06-01 → 2025-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10412948

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10412948, Immunologic Biomarkers of Rejection in Clinical Liver Transplantation (5K08CA245220-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10412948. Licensed CC0.

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