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Home > Healthcare Professionals > Research Awards > 2008 Research Awards > Dr. Tina Sumpter

Dr. Tina L. Sumpter, PhD

2008 Roger L. Jenkins, MD Postdoctoral Research Fellow. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "Molecular Crosstalk and the Regulation of Tolerance in Liver Dendritic Cells."


Dr. Tina Sumpter, PhD

Following an organ transplant, there is always the concern that the recipient’s immune system will attack the foreign tissue and reject the transplanted organ. For this reason, transplant recipients must take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives, and the effectiveness of these drugs varies from case to case. Patients receiving liver transplants, however, are less likely to reject the new organ and more likely to tolerate it well compared to patients receiving other kinds of solid organ transplants. It is not clear what exactly makes liver tissue different from other tissues in this respect, or why contracting a viral infection significantly increases the danger of liver transplant rejection.

The main objective of Dr. Sumpter's study is to investigate why liver tissue is less prone to rejection than other tissues. The findings from this study may contribute to the development of more effective anti-rejection drugs for liver transplant recipients. Dr. Sumpter is focusing on dendritic cells from the liver, cells that are responsible for activating and deactivating the immune response. Previous studies have shown that, when exposed to bacterial byproducts, liver dendritic cells do not respond as strongly to the signs of infection as do dendritic cells from other organs. In other words, even under normal conditions, liver dendritic cells are relatively weak at triggering immune responses. This may explain why transplanted livers are less likely to activate the recipient’s immune system. Dr. Sumpter is in the process of investigating, at the molecular level, why liver dendritic cells behave in this way and the role that various chemical messengers play in regulating these cells.

Page updated: August 14th, 2008