Eric Spierings

Since 2008, I have been appointed as a staff member at the UMCU. From that position, I am responsible as transplant immunologist and started my own line of research on T-cell epitopes in transplantation. In 2015, I completed my training in medical immunology. In 2021, I was appointed as Associate Professor. These combined diagnostic and research responsibilities facilitated me to position my research in a strong translational context. My research is embedded in the Center for Translational Immunology and part of the main UMCU strategic research programs Infection and Immunity and Cancer. In the past 4 years, my research had an strong emphasis on T-cell mediated immune responses towards mismatched HLA. The patented PIRCHE algorithm plays a central role in my studies, showing that PIRCHE-based evaluations of mismatched transplants provide a good risk classifier for transplant outcome. These outcomes may be influenced by effector T cells directly or via facilitating antibody/B-cell responses. This concept has been evaluated in stem-cell transplantation cohorts, pregnancy, kidney transplantation, and pancreas transplantation. Recently, we used the PIRCHE concept to estimate the potential presence of memory T-cells, showing that overlap in immunizing and transplantation epitopes derived from HLA is a strong risk factor for developing HLA antibodies and graft rejection. Apart from clinical outcomes, my research aims to deliver practical tools to make these evaluations possible, to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed matching approach, and to execute health economics evaluations to show societal and economical impact of using this matching system. Future research will address aspects such as combining the PIRCHE algorithm with HLA antibody epitope predictors, following the concept of linked recognition. Moreover, we planned to further refine the PIRCHE definition, using HLA binding assays and data and molecular modeling approaches. Finally, we recently started in-vitro T-cell analyses to obtain a more detailed insight into the HLA-specific T cells and their T-cell receptors using bulk and single cell Next Generation Sequencing techniques.