Decades of research by DoM's Dr. Philip Halloran leads to kidney transplant breakthrough
29 May 2025
By Gillian Rutherford, Folio
Decades of research lead to kidney transplant breakthrough
Celebrated kidney transplant expert likes to joke that he publishes his research regularly in the prestigious scientific journal Nature — that is, once every 51 years.
The first paper, published in 1974, reported on , leading to organ failure.
The second, published just last month, , representing a career’s worth of clinical observation and scientific inquiry, with many successes, failures and a few serendipitous discoveries along the way.
The newest paper follows a , a newly developed drug that suppresses a process now known as antibody-mediated rejection (ABMR), which is the culprit behind about half of all transplanted kidney failures.
Researchers in Vienna, Berlin and Edmonton, led at the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ by Halloran and his team, examined biopsies at the molecular level from 10 patients treated with the drug and 10 placebo patients at the pre-treatment, end-of-treatment (six months) and post-treatment stages (six months later).
All patients with active rejection who took the drug showed suppression of the rejection activity. The treated group also showed less damage to their kidney tissue than the placebo group, even after treatment was stopped, suggesting the drug could delay organ failure.
Though the drug must still undergo further clinical trials, Halloran hopes that one day it will be used on a regular basis to prevent kidney failure indefinitely in some patients.
“The goal is that when you do an organ transplant, it doesn’t fail,” he says. “We hope this new agent will be released for therapy and that people with this form of rejection can live normal lives, whereas previously, they’d have been locked into failure within a few years.”