The results demonstrate a relationship between low ITPA activity and AEs and support the idea that the determination of ITPA phenotype might be an appropriate alternative to genotyping.

A potential benefit of pharmacodynamic monitoring to optimize immunosuppressive combination therapy has been demonstrated. In particular, CD26 and CD71 may be promising biomarkers to assess adequate immunosuppression in the early phase after kidney transplantation. The results of this pilot study require verification in further trials with more patients and events as well as with different graft types.

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Background: clinically, both viral load and genotypes have been found to be major predictors of antiviral therapy outcome regarding chronic hepatitis c and they are, under normal circumstances, performed as separate assays. design and methods: in order to improve the diagnostic strategy and subsequently reduce the reagent costs we have developed and established the simultaneous quantification and genotyping of hepatitis c virus rna by a two-step real-time pcr on the lightcycler instrument (roche diagnostics). results: The quantification assay was calibrated against WHO Standard 96/790. The detection limit was 30 IU/ml, the dynamic range up to 500,000,000 IU/ml. Intra-and interassay imprecisions were 1.2% and 1.9% (n = 10), respectively. The HCV RNA values obtained by real-time pcr assay were highly correlated with those obtained by the cobas Amplicor HCV monitor test (r = 0.992; p < 0.001). conclusions: the genotyping was performed by means of the melting temperature analysis. The concordance between our new genotyping method and the Trugene HCV 5'NC Kit was at the level of genotypes 100%. This rapid (3 h) and convenient assay is suitable for hcv genotyping, hcv detection and disease monitoring.