Applying Precision Medicine to Organ Donation – What are your thoughts?

Hey, everyone! This is Rhea and I recently attended the Predictive, Preventative and Personalized Medicine (PPPM) Conference that was held by Stanford Students in Biodesign at Stanford University.

This conference was an amazing experience, as the panel speakers included Dean Lloyd Minor from Stanford University, Dr. Michael Zwick from Emory University, Ms. Charlotte Weaver from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Mr. Chris Lunt from the All of Us Research Program, Dr. Lou Garrison from University of Washington, Dr. Shuji Ogino from Harvard Medical School, Dr. Cynthia Morton from Harvard Medical School and Dr. Dan Anderson from MIT.

From this conference, I learned invaluable information about the focus of personalized/precision health and medicine, and realized that the field of precision health can also be applied to organ donation and transplants.

Dean Lloyd Minor of Stanford University defined precision health as targeted and personalized health care designed to predict, prevent and cure diseases. He talked about how genome sequencing can help physicians make better predictions about the propensity of developing a severe, acute disease, and a thought occurred to me: Can genomic sequencing help doctors make better predictions about the propensity for a transplant to be rejected in the human body? And this got me thinking: Can precision health and targeted, individualized treatment after transplantation decrease the risk of transplant failure and transplant rejection?

I started doing more research about the precision health approach to addressing problems associated with organ donation and became intrigued with the field of transplantomics (which combines organ and tissue transplantation with genomics and is part of the recent personalized and precision medicine movement).

Additionally, Dr. Dan Anderson from MIT talked about his research in the field of tissue and organ engineering in the conference. He explained how he is engineering complex organ tissues, such as the human pancreas, in order to solve the shortage of available organ and tissue donors. One of the major challenges he faces in this area is fibrosis, which is the human body’s natural immune response to organ transplants. Fibrosis is when scarring and excess fibrous tissue wraps around the transplanted organ/tissue, and attempts to cut off the organ/tissue’s access to oxygen and other necessary nutrients, thereby essentially “starving” the organ/tissue and causing it to slowly die. Dr. Anderson’s research at MIT aims at successfully creating organs and tissues that can be implanted in the human body and not induce fibrosis. I was interested in how this can help solve the scarcity of organs and tissues available for transplantation, but had the following question: Are these complex, engineered organ tissues more readily accepted by human bodies and cost-effective than 3-D printed organs once they are actually implanted? I believe that 3-D printed organs may be more successfully implanted into a person’s body. Since they are not living tissue, even if immune responses such as fibrosis occur, this shouldn’t harm the functionality of the transplanted 3-D organ. However, this is purely speculation and I will have to do more in-depth research to find out. I will keep you all posted.

Overall, the PPPM Conference at Stanford University was an extraordinary experience and made me consider many possible ways to tie in my passion for precision medicine into the field of organ donation. What are your thoughts about using the precision health approach and the engineering of organs/tissues in order to address organ donation? Leave your thoughts below!