Lung transplant recipients undergo immunosuppression to prevent their body's immune system from rejecting the donated lung. However, excessive immunosuppression makes these patients prone to infections. Clinically, it is often difficult to distinguish between infection and rejection in lung transplant patients when they become ill. Currently available tests rarely allow a physician to definitively decide which process is occurring.

The current treatment method is to treat both conditions simultaneously. The obvious shortcomings with this approach are that the patient's immune system is being suppressed when they potentially have an infection, or the patient is being administered high doses of powerful antibiotics which are unnecessary because they are potentially undergoing transplant rejection. The endoarterial biopsy catheter has the potential to solve this dilemma by more definitively answering the infection versus rejection question.

Obtaining an endoarterial biopsy sample would more clearly indicate the presence or absence of rejection and thus allow the optimal therapy to be given. The device also has the potential to be used on a surveillance basis for lung transplant recipients, by detecting the earliest proteomic signs of vascular changes associated with chronic rejection.

Physicians can then prevent chronic rejection by adjusting immunosuppression levels before irreversible changes occur in the targeted transplanted lung. Overmedication can also be minimized based on the absence of vascular changes. It has been demonstrated in the scientific literature that vascular changes are some of the earliest and most sensitive changes associated with transplant rejection, and the endoarterial biopsy catheter has detected these changes in animal models of lung transplant rejection.

mRNA analysis of biopsy samples. Elevated VCAM levels measured by PT-PCR in endoarterial biopsy samples from left transplanted lung of an animal model are predictive of lung transplant rejection

To download a PDF copy of our research on lung transplant rejection detection with the endoarterial biopsy catheter published in Transplantation, please click here:
Increased Expression of Endoarterial Vascular Cell Adhesion Molecule-1 mRNA in an Experimental Model of Lung Transplant Rejection: Diagnosis by Pulmonary Arterial Biopsy by A. Rothman, D. Mann et. al. Transplantation. Vol. 75, No. 7. April 15, 2003. (Full Text-648k download)

CAUTION - Investigational Device. Limited by Federal law to investigational use.
This device should be used only by physicians with a thorough understanding of percutaneous interventional procedures.