Can Immune Cell Function Assay Identify Patients at Risk of Infection or Rejection? A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

The current evidence suggests that CICFA is not able to identify individuals at risk of infection or rejection. Additional studies are still needed to clarify the usefulness of this test for identifying risks of infection and rejection in transplant recipients.

Lack of clinical significance of the ImmuKnowTM-Cylex assay for the detection of cellular immune function in patients with renal cell carcinoma

“…In contrast to this, Table 1 shows that there was no significant difference in the ATP levels from CD4 + T cells before and after the therapy. The results were not consistent with our expectation; a possible reason might be that the sensitivity of the ImmuKnow method has been reported to be low (Husain et al, 2009;Ling et al, 2012), and thus might not detect the change associated with an increase in immune function. Therefore, we concluded that the detection of ATP levels from CD4 + T cells by the Immuknow TM -Cylex ® assay did not reflect the actual immune status of patients with renal cancer after surgery.…”

“…However, as shown in Figure 1, our results demonstrated that the ATP levels were not significantly different at the different time points. A possible reason for this might be that the ImmuKnow method has been found to exhibit low sensitivity toward the detection of ATP content (Husain et al, 2009;Ling et al, 2012); this assay might not therefore recognize the immune function changes in patients with renal cancer. We expected that patient immunity would have decreased 10 days after the surgery; however, Figure 1 shows that the intracellular ATP levels from CD4 + T cells at this time were significantly higher than at other time points.…”

Monitoring of intracellular adenosine triphosphate in CD4+T cells to predict the occurrence of cytomegalovirus disease in kidney transplant recipients

“…Cumulative incidence curves were constructed for study outcomes (overall and bacterial infection and CMV diseases) with death treated as a competing risk, and differences between groups were compared with the log-rank test. Uni-and multivariate Cox regression models were used to evaluate the association between iATP categories at each point (baseline and months 1 and 6 after transplantation) and outcomes throughout the following periods (early [first month], intermediate [months [1][2][3][4][5][6], and late periods [months [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], respectively) [1]. Associations were expressed as hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).…”

“…A detailed description of the 13 cases of CMV disease diagnosed in the intermediate period in which iATP levels at month 1 were available is provided as Supporting Information (Table S2). Finally, there were no significant differences in the incidence of infection at the end of the late period (i.e., months [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] according to the CMI response at month 6.…”

“…Lastly, the protocol of the ImmuKnow â assay is relatively simple and does not require special laboratory equipment. Notwithstanding these advantages and the large number of studies performed [11][12][13][14][15], the clinical application of this biomarker is not widespread, likely due to the suboptimal performance shown by the ImmuKnow â assay for predicting post-transplant infection [16,17]. A shortcoming of most studies is that the indication for measuring iATP was motivated by the clinical suspicion of infection rather than being ordered within a scheduled monitoring strategy.…”