End-stage kidney disease is preferably treated by kidney transplantation. The suboptimal function of the allograft often results in misbalances in kidney-controlled processes and requires long-term monitoring of allograft function and viability. As the kidneys are organs with a very high metabolomic rate, a metabolomics approach is suitable to describe systematic changes in post-transplant patients and has great potential for monitoring allograft function, which has not been described yet. In this study, we used blood plasma samples from 55 patients after primary kidney transplantation identically treated with immunosuppressants with follow-up 50 months in the mean after surgery and evaluated relative levels of basal plasma metabolites detectable by NMR spectroscopy. We were looking for the correlations between circulating metabolites levels and allograft performance and allograft rejection features. Our results imply a quantitative relationship between restricted renal function, insufficient hydroxylation of phenylalanine to tyrosine, lowered renal glutamine utilization, shifted nitrogen balance, and other alterations that are not related exclusively to the metabolism of the kidney. No link between allograft function and energy metabolism can be concluded, as no changes were found for glucose, glycolytic intermediates, and 3-hydroxybutyrate as a ketone body representative. The observed changes are to be seen as a superposition of changes in the comprehensive inter-organ metabolic exchange, when the restricted function of one organ may induce compensatory effects or cause secondary alterations. Particular differences in plasma metabolite levels in patients with acute cellular and antibody-mediated allograft rejection were considered rather to be related to the loss of kidney function than to the molecular mechanism of graft rejection since they largely follow the alterations observed by restricted allograft function. In the end, we showed using a simple mathematical model, multilinear regression, that the basal plasmatic metabolites correlated with allograft function expressed by the level of glomerular filtration rate (with creatinine: p-value = 4.0 × 10-26 and r = 0.94, without creatinine: p-value = 3.2 × 10-22 and r = 0.91) make the noninvasive estimation of the allograft function feasible.
Keywords: NMR plasma metabolomics; allograft function; kidney transplantation.