Project: Biomedical survival analysis of liver transplanted patients

Motivation:
The survival benefit of liver transplanted patients often varies remarkably. Thus, revealing genetic marker predicting the patients benefit of liver transplantations would be a mile stone for patients survival.

Research Project:
In a close cooperation with the AG Bioinformatik (Head: PD Dr. Dr. Teufel) and the surgical department (Head: Prof. Dr. Otto) of the Uniklinik Mainz, a dataset involving 101 liver transplanted patients were collected. This dataset includes clinical data of the donor and their corresponding recipients. Whereas clinical data of the recipients were monitored over a time period of five years. Further, biopsies were taken after the resection of the donor livers and directly after the transplantation into the recipient as well as following up biopsies after one, three and five years. Afterwards genetic profiles were created using the Illumina microarray technology.
One of the main goals of this research project is analyzing the clinical data to reveal potential clinical factors which closely correlated with the patient survival. A hypothesis for example could be: Did the cold ischemia time (CIT) affects the recipients survival? With respect to the individual genetic profiles, other goals are the identification of survival associated genes which could be used as diagnostic score to predict patients survival. Finally, time series analysis will be applied to the gentic profiles to evaluate genes affecting the longtime benefit of the liver transplantation.