Ali Naji
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
The immune system protects us by attacking anything foreign, and that same defense threatens transplanted organs and drives autoimmune diabetes. Kidney transplants are the best treatment for kidney failure, but rejection remains the most common reason transplanted kidneys fail.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
kidney transplantation
transplant tolerance
allograft rejection
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Test whether stringent B cell depletion with CD20-targeted CAR T cells lets B cells regrow tolerant of a transplanted kidney in cynomolgus macaques, and analyze resulting B and T cell alloimmunity at cellular and molecular levels.
- Develop an mRNA-LNP method that generates CAR T cells directly inside the body, delivering mRNA in lipid nanoparticles, to ease clinical translation of B-cell-targeted transplant tolerance.
- Run a proof-of-concept trial combining CD19- and BCMA-targeted CAR T cells to remove memory B cells and plasma cells and lower anti-HLA antibodies in kidney transplant candidates with cPRA ≥99.9%.
- Evaluate CAR T cell behavior, allo-specific and protective immunity, vaccine responses and, after any transplant, graft biology in highly sensitized patients receiving CART-19 plus CART-BCMA.
- Profile pancreata, islets and immune tissues from donors with type 1 diabetes, autoantibody-positive and control donors using islet function assays, single-cell sequencing, mass cytometry, spatial transcriptomics and CODEX imaging.
- Build and maintain PANC-DB, an open-access database that shares integrated physiologic, genomic, immunologic and histologic data from the Human Pancreas Analysis Program.
More about the research
Patients also need lifelong immune-suppressing drugs. Many waitlisted patients already carry antibodies against donor tissue, which blocks transplantation. The lab's projects focus on B cells, the immune cells that make antibodies and present targets to T cells. They test chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, a patient's own T cells engineered to hunt specific cells, as a way to clear harmful B cells. A third program profiles human pancreas and immune tissues to understand type 1 diabetes (T1D), an autoimmune attack on insulin-making cells.
Why it matters
Kidney failure patients could benefit if CAR T cells can clear antibody-producing cells before transplant or train the immune system to accept a donor kidney. This could expand access for highly sensitized patients and reduce rejection and the costs and harms of lifelong immunosuppression. Open human pancreas data could reveal how type 1 diabetes develops and point to ways to prevent or treat it.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Immune repertoire remodeling following B cell-targeted CAR T cells for induction of renal allograft tolerance in non-human primates
NIH · May 2025 – Apr 2030
Human Pancreas Analysis Program for Type 1 Diabetes - HPAP-T1D
NIH · Sep 2016 – Jun 2029
Autologous chimeric antigen receptor engineered T cell immunotherapy for desensitization in patients awaiting kidney transplantation
NIH · Aug 2021 – May 2028
Closest labs
Reza Abdi
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Optimize the stability, binding and body distribution of nanoparticles carrying an antibody against PNAd, a molecule found only on high endothelial venules, in NOD mice that develop type 1 diabetes.
Hirotake Komatsu
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Build human islet organoids about 5 mm thick by layering parylene microcapillary mesh that carries oxygen from flowing culture medium, testing whether a dynamic culture system keeps the organoid core alive past the usual diffusion limit.
Joseph Turek
Duke University, NC·Microbiology & Immunology
Assess the safety and effectiveness of cultured thymus tissue implantation (CTTI) for inducing tolerance to a heart from the same donor in young miniature swine, including the conditioning needed and the fate of implanted thymus slices.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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