# THE VIROME AND ADVERSE OUTCOMES IN LUNG TRANSPLANTATION

> **NIH NIH R33** · WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $698,349

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
 Lung transplantation is the therapy of choice for numerous patients suffering from end stage pulmonary
failure. Unfortunately, long term outcomes after lung transplantation remain disappointing with 5-year graft
survival rates of only 50%, which lag substantially behind other solid organ transplants. The two most common
events that can occur early after lung transplantation and that predispose to late graft failure are ischemia
reperfusion injury-mediated primary graft dysfunction (PGD) and acute rejection (AR). PGD occurs in up to
25% of lung transplant recipients and leads to enhanced mortality. AR occurs in more than half of patients and
leads to increased risk of chronic rejection. While current dogma clearly suggests that innate and adaptive
immune responses play significant roles in the etiologies of PGD and AR, there has been almost no effort to
define a potential role of viruses in PGD, and there have been few unbiased, systematic efforts to evaluate
viral associations with AR. For lung transplant recipients, persistent or latent viruses within the lung itself, as
well as viruses systemically circulating in the blood that could infect the lung de novo, could potentially impact
outcomes in lung transplantation. The advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has enabled for the first
time, systematic and unbiased analysis of the virome (i.e. the complete spectrum of viruses) of a given
biological specimen. Critically, efforts to define the virome, and its potential association with disease in the
context of lung transplantation are sorely lacking. The goals of the R61 Phase are to prospectively collect
specimens from a cohort of lung transplant recipients and define statistical associations of the virome with
PGD and or AR. The goals of the R33 phase are to validate results from the R61 in an independent cohort,
characterize the viruses that are associated with PGD and/or AR by establishing cell culture and mouse
models, and finally to define the impact of viral infection in a mouse lung transplant model on PGD and/or AR.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9928487
- **Project number:** 5R33HL137079-04
- **Recipient organization:** WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** DAVID WANG
- **Activity code:** R33 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $698,349
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-05-01 → 2022-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9928487

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9928487, THE VIROME AND ADVERSE OUTCOMES IN LUNG TRANSPLANTATION (5R33HL137079-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9928487. Licensed CC0.

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