Bioinformatics Seminar
Time:
Venue: Na
6 September 2016
NaHeart transplants in children: can we predict rejection from peripheral blood expression?
Gordon SmythWEHI Bioinformatics
The Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne is the national centre for paediatric heart transplantation in Australia. It performs transplants on 10-15 children per year. Transplants have to checked regularly for signs of rejection. Current practice is to take regular endomyocardial biopsies ; removing a small sample of heart tissue ; and this has to be done every month or so. Each biopsy requires travel to hospital ; hospital admission ; general anaesthetic and surgery. The biopsies are costly ; invasive ; risky and burdensome for all concerned ; especially for the children. A test for rejection based on a blood sample would be enormously less invasive and might reduce the need for biopsies. This talk will examine RNA-seq profiles of blood samples taken from 18 children with heart transplants over a 3 year period ; to determine how well we can predict mild or moderate rejection from the expression data. The work is a collaboration with Professor Igor Konstantinov's group at the RCH.;Davis Auditorium at 11am;