The London Calling 2024 session I watched tonight is called “Precision immunology in transplant: paving the way to operational tolerance.” Karen Sherwood from The University of British Columbia presented the Genome Canada Transplant Consortium work. The group noticed that trying to match organs and recipients on a genetic level was complex. Using next-generation sequencing, HLA alleles and epitopes could be identified. High-resolution typing helps understand the immunogenicity. Sherwood explained that their epitope matching program allows for quick comparisons. With organs from deceased donors, there is very limited time. The team tried to standardize across all fourteen Canadian transplant labs. The first phase included six donor labs and sequencing. The initial validation trials were successful. Sherwood explained that operational tolerance is the next goal so that Nanopore can be part of the protocols used routinely. Sherwood shared their latest ways of incorporating Nanopore sequencing into clinical settings. For example, adaptive sampling in AML was used. The entire team spans several clinical labs and institutions in Canada. This session shared updates on ultra-rapid sequencing in clinical settings.
