Gene Expression Profiling in Organ Transplantation

Aim of Review. Huge effort is being made among the transplant community investigating novelbiomarkers that enable transplant clinicians to identify patients at risk for allograftrejection or those who will develop tolerance so that immunosuppression could besafely minimized or even ideally withdrawn. Despite the important advances achieved in the identification of several potentialbiomarkers of tolerance, rejection, or both, validation and demonstration of their clinicalutility still needs to be tested, which will need international cooperative networks. It is important to note that the reproducibility of differently expressed genes might beaffected by many factors such as gene ranking and selection methods, inherentdifferences between types, and the choice of thresholds. However, because microarrayanalyses are expensive and time consuming and their statistical evaluation is often verydifficult, gene expression analysis using the RTPCR method is nowadaysrecommended. Conclusions. In the field of organ transplantation, gene-expression-based decision might help inimproving patient and graft outcome and there are a multitude of studies showing thatgene-expression profiling is feasible