ABSTRACT
Immunosuppressant failures consisting of organ rejection or drug toxicity continue to affect roughly one-half of all patients [1]. Better assays are needed to measure immunosuppression in order to better manage it and assess individual risk/benefi t ratios. Clinical necessities dictate that such an assay system replicate the host-graft interaction with minimal perturbations; be scalable to accommodate multiple samples in a clinical lab; delivers an output within a few hours to a day, and utilize a readily available source of recipient immune cells, especially if the recipient is a child. Because concerns for subject safety have unifi ed all such efforts with the common purpose of developing a substitute for allograft biopsy, the peripheral blood lymphocyte has, by default, become the most studied representative of the human immune system.
