The Management of Antibodies in Transplantation

Dear Colleagues

This Special Issue aims to review the current knowledge about the importance of antibodies in transplantation. It is intended to address the current situation on how to handle antibodies in transplant patients in the aspects, diagnosis, therapy, and clinical follow-up. The Special Issue intends to cover all of the aspects of antibodies that provide clinical utility, so as to compile updated information that can help both the design of new applications or new predictive and evolutionary markers, and to implement the latest generation therapeutic tools.

In the diagnostic aspect, the presence of pre-transplant antibodies, such as antibodies associated with organ–receptor compatibility, antibodies associated with the disease that destroyed the function of the organ to be transplanted, or autoimmune markers associated with the appearance of diseases that will appear after transplantation. Also important are the autoantibodies that appear post-transplant, including specific donor antibodies associated with the risk of rejection and autoantibodies associated with other pathologies that complicate the evolution of the transplant or mediate the resurgence of the underlying disease.

The therapeutic use of antibodies for transplant control has been used for years in conditioning treatments of the organ receptor (thymoglobulin), but in recent years, it has been increased after the introduction of monoclonal antibody-based therapies to control infections, and especially for the modulation of immunity. The use of immunomodulatory antibodies, especially those that act on the checkpoints of the immune synapse, has allowed patients to be effectively prevented and treated, and their role is expected to be increasingly important.

This Special Issue of Antibodies is aimed at updating how the management of different types of antibodies can influence the greater efficiency of organ transplants. In this Issue, we review the current knowledge on the therapeutic antibodies in organ transplantation, but also on the use of antibodies useful in the diagnosis and monitoring of patients.

This Issue fits both the reviews and the new advances in the use of antibodies as a diagnostic and/or therapeutic tool to assess patients (prognosis and evolution of the transplant) and to control their evolution (modulating therapies). The design and clinical application of therapeutic antibodies requires an understanding of their function, their pharmacodynamics, and possible adverse reactions/loss of efficacy. Also of interest are the advances towards the generation of new antibodies with better pharmacodynamic properties, better targets for their action, or various isotypes (IgA, IgM, and IgE) with different half-lives and behaviors that help to better focus their activity and the duration of the same.

Prof. Dr. Antonio Serrano
Prof. Dr. Esther Mancebo
Prof. Dr. Maria José Castro
Guest Editors

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• alloantibodies
• donor specific antibodies
• rejection
• tolerance
• immunomodulation
• antibody immunosuppressive therapy
• autoantibodies
• immune checkpoints