Application of Systems Immunology for Solid Organ Transplantation and Related Complications

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Background

With its exciting development, transplantation is considered as an effective treatment for most types of organ failure. The advent of immunosuppressant drugs is essential to the significant increase in the success rate of solid organ transplantation. However, postoperative rejection is not completely eliminated by them. Its recurrent episodes may cause permanent damage to the allograft and even lead the allograft to necrosis. Moreover, transplant recipients now live longer, and the immunosuppression strategies have been improved to the point that rejection is no longer the only concern. The focus of immunosuppression management has now switched to limiting the complications and risks which are associated with long-term maintenance immunosuppression. To tackle these problems, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of the system biology after solid organ transplantation, including but not limited to immunological phenotypes, immunometabolism, and the immune response involved. Nowadays, the development of high-throughput technologies has made the profiling of genomes, epigenomes, transcriptomes, microbiomes and metabolomes possible. These advanced approaches will deepen the understanding of system biology and help implementing personalized medicine strategies for clinical immunosurveillance, dose adjustment of immunosuppressants, and enabling novel immunosuppressive therapies.

Immunological phenotypes and immunometabolism are widely associated with the diagnostic and therapeutic outcomes of solid organ transplantation. Precisive evaluation of tolerance and rejection and the corresponding personalized treatment are essential to ensure clinical success. Meanwhile, post-transplantation complications such as infections and graft versus host disease (GvHD) are often seen in clinical practice, yet we still do not have a good understanding of the underlying mechanism and are lack of effective therapeutic means. In-depth study on system biology will be beneficial to uncover biomarkers to monitor graft function. Moreover, understanding the role of different cell subsets, such as deficiency of regulatory T cells in transplantation rejection and graft is helpful to design individualized immunosuppressants.

With the advancement of systems biology and systems immunology, these challenges are constantly addressed and studied and the scientific community expects new viewpoints and solutions in this context. Study on system biology has enabled comprehensive investigation of the whole immunology, including immunology phenotype, signaling, function and metabolism, on transplant function and survival for further understanding the complex mechanisms associated with graft function. Identification of molecular and cellular events that precede clinical and histopathological changes might help in early intervention and thereby increase the graft half‐life.

This Research Topic paves the way for new advances in the use of systems immunology to obtain clear immunological phenotypes and immunometabolism profiles in solid organ transplantation, and, therefore, to enable reliable systems biology models and novel therapeutic strategies to immunosuppressive therapy. Furthermore, analysis of the immune response induced by immunosuppressants is beneficial to clinical immunosurveillance and the dose adjustment of immunosuppressants.

We welcome submissions of Original Research, Mini Review, Methods, and Review using Systems Immunology for the purposes below:

• Analysis of the regulatory response induced by immunosuppressants
• Identification of immune cell phenotypes after transplantation
• Examinination of immune cell interactions in the recipient transplant with related complications
• Profiling immunometabolism of immune cells after transplantation and during post-transplantation complications

Keywords: immunosuppressants, organ transplantation, immunometabolism, tolerance and rejection, post-transplantation complications

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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