AlloDx Liver Transplant cfDNA Fragmentomics Research Selected for ATC 2024

The 2024 American Organ Transplantation Conference will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA from June 1st to 5th (Eastern Time). The AlloDx R&D team will discuss "Research on cfDNA multimodal fragmentomics in liver transplantation"The results are very honored to be invited to give a poster presentation at this ATC.

As a biomarker widely used in clinical applications, cfDNA contains multi-dimensional biological information, including fragment size distribution, end motif, jagged ends, preferred end coordinates, nucleosome footprints and gene expression inference. cfDNA fragmentomics is an emerging technology that uses the multidimensional characteristics of cfDNA to identify its tissue origin and reflect physiological and pathological conditions.

Current research shows that cfDNA fragmentomics can be used as biomarkers in oncology, non-invasive prenatal testing, and autoimmune diseases. For example, some studies have found that deletion of the Dnase1l3 gene may lead to changes in cfDNA fragment length and terminal motif frequency. The terminal motif diversity of plasma cfDNA is significantly increased in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, and aberrant terminal motifs are also observed in patients with other cancer types.

In the field of organ transplantation, the application of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) is limited to simply quantifying the relationship between donor-derived cfDNA and rejection. The AlloDx R&D team analyzed the cfDNA sequencing data of 74 liver transplant patients two weeks after surgery and found that there were significantly changed terminal motifs at different %dd-cfDNA levels, and used the deep learning model LDLM to classify the patients. The LDLM model performed excellently on the training set and validation set, fully mining the information of cfDNA fragmentomics. On the test set, the LDLM model achieved a sensitivity of 0.73 and an AUC value of 0.78.

The AlloDx team was among the early to conduct post-transplant early liver transplant fragmentomics research. This study proposed a new method using cfDNA fragmentomics to monitor dd-cfDNA levels, emphasized its importance, and validated the effectiveness of the LDLM model in accurately classifying liver transplant patients, which is of significant meaning for advancing transplant organ rejection diagnosis.

About the American Transplantation Congress (ATC)

The American Transplant Congress (ATC) is the joint annual meeting of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS) and the American Society of Transplantation (AST), and is one of the academically influential events in the international organ transplantation field. The congress focuses on global transplantation hotspots and brings together the latest frontier scientific research achievements in organ transplantation. This year's ATC is the 15th edition, and more than 4,000 transplantation specialists from 54 countries will attend, with over 600 frontier research achievements expected to be presented at this ATC.

Cover source:

Ding SC, Lo YMD. Cell-Free DNA Fragmentomics in Liquid Biopsy. Diagnostics. 2022; 12(4):978. https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics12040978