September 9, 2026
Key Takeaways
- The National Institutes of Health has awarded The Ohio State University College of Medicine and The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy a $3.23 million grant to study a potential way to increase the number of donor livers available for transplant.
- The four-year project will study one form of a protein called CD38 that may contribute to damage in donor livers during the transplant process.
- Researchers say the work could help move new drug candidates toward Phase I trials and potentially lead to hundreds more liver transplants each year.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The National Institutes of Health has awarded The Ohio State University College of Medicine and The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy a $3.23 million grant to study a method to increase the number of donor livers available for transplant.
The four-year National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases R01 award will focus on the damage that happens to donor livers when the blood supply is cut off and then restored. About one in 10 livers from donation after brain death and three out of 10 livers from donation after cardiac death (DCD) donors are unsuitable for transplant due to this damage.
“There’s currently no approved drug that prevents or reverses this injury,” said Sylvester Black, MD, PhD, principal investigator and surgical director of liver transplantation at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Comprehensive Transplant Center. “This research will focus on closing this gap.”
The “Targeting Intracellular CD38 to Reduce Ischemia Reperfusion Injury in Liver Transplantation” study will focus on an enzyme inside the cell called type III CD38. This enzyme depletes the cell's ability to produce energy and repair itself, and that sets off a cascade of events that lead to cell death inside the liver.
“CD38 has been studied for years in cancer and immunology in its well-known type II form, an enzyme that sits on the outside of the cell,” said Blake Peterson, PhD, principal investigator and chair of the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy at the Ohio State College of Pharmacy. “Every CD38 drug developed to date, including cancer therapeutics already on the market, targets the outside form. Those drugs work far less effectively against the form of CD38 found inside cells which we believe contributes to donor organ injury.”
Peterson’s lab developed a new testing method that he calls the fluorescent probe cellular binding assay, a tool that can measure how well potential drugs engage the type III CD38 inside a living cell. Using this technology, the research team has identified several promising drug candidates, including a lead compound that's about 10 times more potent than earlier prototypes at protecting cells from injury, and a second compound that's more than 25 times more potent.
This grant funds the next stage of research, including testing a wide range of potential drugs using an approach called high throughput screening available through The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Drug Discovery Shared Resource. The most promising candidates will be studied in animal DCD transplant models and human donor liver tissue.
The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center has an Organ Assessment and Repair Center that uses normothermic machine perfusion to keep donor organs alive and functioning outside the body. That same infrastructure is one of the delivery routes the research team will use to move this treatment toward Phase I trials. The study points to a future where transplant centers are not just preserving organs before transplant but actively treating them.
“Even a 10 to 20% increase in donor liver utilization could mean hundreds more transplants a year,” Black said. “What excites me most is that the same tissue damage shows up in stroke, heart attack and acute kidney injury. This platform has real potential to reach well beyond the liver.”
Peterson said, “This grant represents a collaborative effort between transplantation science and medicinal chemistry. We are working to develop first in class therapeutics to solve a clinical transplant problem.”
Media Contact
Serena Smith, Ohio State Wexner Medical Center Media Relations, Serena.Smith@osumc.edu