Renal transplantation remains an important therapy in treating renal failure and can be considered to be a curative treatment. The demand for renal grafts outstrips supply available each year, making it increasingly important to look at improving the treatment of both renal grafts and recipients, and thereby improving patient outcomes and increasing the pool of potential donor grafts. Important to this, however, is knowledge of the underlying mechanisms leading to damage to the graft and rejection from the recipient. This includes ischaemia and consequently the priming of the organ during storage for ischaemia reperfusion injury (IRI) on implantation and the importance of the innate immune system which can be activated via multiple pathways, often via TLR-4, and the consequent production of danger-associated molecular patterns. This makes the time period involving both explantation and storage an important therapeutic window for improving outcomes. Other windows explored include treatment of IRI and improvement in immunosuppressive therapy. The multiple windows of potential therapeutic input have spawned a large body of work exploring both the underlying mechanisms and also how to exploit these mechanisms to improve overall outcomes and to allow for more marginal organs to be used.
Keywords: Brain death; DAMP; Ischaemia reperfusion injury; Renal transplant; TLR 4.