Kidney Transplant Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Kidney Transplant, including details on risks, prognosis, procedure, surgery, organ donation.

Malignancy after kidney transplantation: still a challenge.

Bosmans JL, Verpooten GA

Department of Nephrology and Hypertension, Antwerp, University Hospital, Edegem, Belgium. JeanLouis.Bosmans@ua.ac.be

Long-term complications of continuous immunosuppression still remain a serious threat and are currently drawing the attention of transplant physicians. Wimmer et al. show that malignancy occurs approximately fourfold more frequently in renal-transplant recipients than in a normal control population. Besides immunosuppression, viruses probably play an important oncogenic role in transplant recipients. The retrospective analysis by Wimmer et al. suggests that mTOR inhibitors and interleukin-2 receptor antibodies are promising immunosuppressive drugs to reduce the risk of cancer after transplantation. These preliminary results must be confirmed in large, prospective, randomized, controlled trials, with long follow-up, designed to evaluate the incidence of de novo malignancy in transplant recipients.

Published 7 June 2007 in Kidney Int, 71(12): 1197-9.
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