The University of California, Los Angeles has announced a three-year, $2 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation in support of research aimed at improving donor liver quality.

The grant will help support a team of researchers from the university's departments of surgery and pathology and laboratory medicine working to address the declining quality of donated organs and a growing disparity between the increasing numbers of potential transplant recipients and inadequate donor organ supply. Led by Dr. Jerzy W. Kupiec-Weglinski, principal investigator for the project and director of the Dumont-UCLA Transplantation Research Center, the researchers hope to rejuvenate donated livers and improve their quality before transplantation by validating novel molecular targets that predict donor liver quality and transplant survival. According to Kupiec-Weglinski, the team hopes to find an alternative to preventing organ rejection by treating transplant patients with cocktails of relatively nonspecific immunosuppressive agents.

"Our project has the potential to result in a significant paradigm shift, opening up the possibility of developing new ways to improve donor organ quality and allow use of otherwise unusable and discarded marginal livers," said Kupiec-Weglinski. "If we succeed, it will have a major and direct impact on organ transplantation worldwide."