COVID-19 and Kidney Transplantation: Clinical Outcomes, Management, and Challenges

A special issue of Journal of Personalized Medicine (ISSN 2075-4426). This special issue belongs to the section "Clinical Medicine, Cell, and Organism Physiology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 July 2022) | Viewed by 4311

Special Issue Editor

1. CHU Besançon, Department of Nephrology, Dialysis and Renal Transplantation, Federation Hospitalo-Universitaire INCREASE, 25000 Besançon, France
2. UMR RIGHT 1098, INSERM-EFS-UFC, 1 Bd Fleming, 25000 Besançon, France
Interests: kidney transplantation; immune senescence; viral infections; diabetes

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Several studies have reported that kidney transplant recipients (KTR) are at increased risk of severe COVID-19 infection. Furthermore, the efficacy of the vaccine is severely reduced in these patients. Therefore, individualized prevention strategies are essential for KTR.  Adaptation of the vaccine scheme is recommended in these patients, including the use of an early third dose and of a fourth dose in vaccine responders. Alternatively, anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody combination can be used to prevent infection in patients with no or low response to three doses of vaccines. However, the net effect of each immunosuppressant on vaccine response may vary, and optimization of the immunosuppressive regimen to improve immunization is practicable. Minimization of immunosuppression and effects of conventional treatment of severe COVID infection are also crucial questions in patients with COVID-19 infection. Finally, a global and integrative approach to COVID-19 infection prevention is required.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Personalized Medicine aims to highlight current knowledge on COVID-19 in KTR. Different studies include personalized prevention, clinical outcomes, medical care, and future challenges. Indeed, this pandemic raises in an acute fashion the question of vaccine protocols and how to approach them in immunocompromised patients.

Dr. Didier Ducloux
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Personalized Medicine is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • kidney transplantation
  • COVID-19
  • vaccine
  • passive immunization
  • immunosuppression
  • prevention

Published Papers (2 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

17 pages, 3761 KiB  
Article
Contrasting EfficientNet, ViT, and gMLP for COVID-19 Detection in Ultrasound Imagery
by Mohamad Mahmoud Al Rahhal, Yakoub Bazi, Rami M. Jomaa, Mansour Zuair and Farid Melgani
J. Pers. Med. 2022, 12(10), 1707; https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm12101707 - 12 Oct 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2112
Abstract
A timely diagnosis of coronavirus is critical in order to control the spread of the virus. To aid in this, we propose in this paper a deep learning-based approach for detecting coronavirus patients using ultrasound imagery. We propose to exploit the transfer learning [...] Read more.
A timely diagnosis of coronavirus is critical in order to control the spread of the virus. To aid in this, we propose in this paper a deep learning-based approach for detecting coronavirus patients using ultrasound imagery. We propose to exploit the transfer learning of a EfficientNet model pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset for the classification of ultrasound images of suspected patients. In particular, we contrast the results of EfficentNet-B2 with the results of ViT and gMLP. Then, we show the results of the three models by learning from scratch, i.e., without transfer learning. We view the detection problem from a multiclass classification perspective by classifying images as COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal. In the experiments, we evaluated the models on a publically available ultrasound dataset. This dataset consists of 261 recordings (202 videos + 59 images) belonging to 216 distinct patients. The best results were obtained using EfficientNet-B2 with transfer learning. In particular, we obtained precision, recall, and F1 scores of 95.84%, 99.88%, and 24 97.41%, respectively, for detecting the COVID-19 class. EfficientNet-B2 with transfer learning presented an overall accuracy of 96.79%, outperforming gMLP and ViT, which achieved accuracies of 93.03% and 92.82%, respectively. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

16 pages, 2394 KiB  
Article
Prediction of Vaccine Response and Development of a Personalized Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination Strategy in Kidney Transplant Recipients: Results from a Large Single-Center Study
by Ilies Benotmane, Gabriela Gautier-Vargas, Noëlle Cognard, Jérôme Olagne, Françoise Heibel, Laura Braun-Parvez, Jonas Martzloff, Peggy Perrin, Romain Pszczolinski, Bruno Moulin, Samira Fafi-Kremer and Sophie Caillard
J. Pers. Med. 2022, 12(7), 1107; https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm12071107 - 05 Jul 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1822
Abstract
Kidney transplant recipients (KTRs) displays marked inter-individual variations in magnitude of immune responses to anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. The aim of this large single-center study was to identify the predictive factors for serological response to the mRNA-1273 vaccine in KTRs. We also devised a score [...] Read more.
Kidney transplant recipients (KTRs) displays marked inter-individual variations in magnitude of immune responses to anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. The aim of this large single-center study was to identify the predictive factors for serological response to the mRNA-1273 vaccine in KTRs. We also devised a score to optimize prediction with the goal of implementing a personalized vaccination strategy. The study population consisted of 564 KTRs who received at least two doses of the mRNA-1273 vaccine. Anti-RBD IgG titers were quantified one month after each vaccine dose and until six months thereafter. A third dose vaccine was given when the antibody titer after the second dose was <143 BAU/mL. A score to optimize prediction of vaccine response was devised using the independent predictors identified in multivariate analysis. The seropositivity rate after the second dose was 46.6% and 22.2% of participants were classified as good responders (titers ≥ 143 BAU/mL). On analyzing the 477 patients for whom serology testing was available after the second or third dose, the global seropositivity rate was 69% (good responders: 46.3%). Immunosuppressive drugs, graft function, age, interval from transplantation, body mass index, and sex were associated with vaccine response. The devised score was strongly associated with the seropositivity rate (AUC = 0.752, p < 0.0001) and the occurrence of a good antibody response (AUC = 0.785, p < 0.0001). Notably, antibody titers declined over time both after the second and third vaccine doses. In summary, a high burden of comorbidities and immunosuppression was correlated with a weaker antibody response. A fourth vaccine dose and/or pre-exposure prophylaxis with monoclonal antibodies should be considered for KTRs who remain unprotected. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop