Matthew Cheung
@MatthewDCheung
Followers
962
Following
2K
Media
112
Statuses
922
MD/PhD student @uabmstp | @jamesgeorgeuab & @anupamuab labs | slu grad | amateur cook | tweets my own | he/him
Birmingham, AL
Joined June 2016
FINALLY OUT! Our work using spatial and single-cell transcriptomics to characterize the human immune response in pig-to-human kidney xenotransplantation is now published @NatureComms 🧵 https://t.co/H0VvNNW2jZ
14
41
136
Halloween on peds is the best! Rounding as a giraffe this morning
1
0
14
As a med student who had 2 children during med school I'm often asked what kind of support I need, and besides the obvious like childcare, I never had a good answer. This elective at the University of Minnesota is the definition of support, all med schools should take notes.
24
181
2K
The 3rd Acute Kidney Injury: Bench to Bedside conference is coming May4-7,2025! Save the date! Great program plus an awesome Workforce development program for trainees! Travel awards, lots of great science and networking in beautiful Leesburg Virginia👇
1
16
22
Limited infiltration of host immune cells in the very first case of 10-gene-edited pig-to-human (brain-dead) Kidney #Xenotransplant <=74 h Minimal B/T lymphocytes CD45+ cells are mainly donor-derived M2-like macrophages, plus neutrophils Love to see more analysis on
1
10
36
Congratulations to outstanding MDPhD students - now Drs. Matthew Cheung and Gelare Ghajar-Rahimi, who successfully defended their theses. It was my honor to serve as co-mentor with Jim George. @UABMSTP @UABHeersink @MatthewDCheung @G_GhajarRahimi
0
9
56
PhDone!!!! Thank you to my amazing friends, family, colleagues, and mentors - couldn't have done any of this without you!
My work son, @MatthewDCheung, just defended his PhD thesis at @uabmedicine and I am speechless. Matthew, you have accomplished so much in such a brief amount of time and I am so incredibly proud of you! ❤️🫘(these are the only kidneys I could find lol) @alhkim #AKI
12
4
55
What an incredible night celebrating the honorees of the @UABgsga Awards, alongside their mentors, family, and friends! We’re immensely proud of these recipients, their outstanding accomplishments & the positive impacts they’ve made on our academic community & beyond! #GoBlazers
0
3
7
It really takes a village. Thank you to the entire UAB xenotransplant team for making this possible! As always, thank you to our donors and their families. And a shout out to my co-mentors (@AnupamUAB and Jim George) for letting me take part in this special project. Cheers!
0
0
4
Nonetheless, our data suggest that a standard immunosuppression regimen can control the immune response to the pig kidney, at least early on. Long term studies are needed. These data will still play a key role in propelling pig kidney xenotransplantation to a clinical reality.
1
1
2
Several study limitations: 1. n =1 (but stay tuned), 2. short-term, 3. tough to validate at protein level due to high cross-reactivity of pig/human antibodies, 4. hard to distinguish impact of gene edits vs pharmacologic interventions
1
0
1
Now we know that in the kidney, these interactions tend to skew macrophages towards a more anti-inflammatory, pro-healing phenotype. And that's exactly what we see in both the pig and human macs when we looked at their gene expression profiles
1
0
1
We did a co-localization analysis to see where these immune cells were found in the kidney. The neutrophils near endothelial cells may be contaminants (which would be good) or a response to the TMA. Interestingly, the human macrophages tended to localize with pig stromal cells
1
0
1
Human myeloid cells, however, infiltrated the pig kidney soon after xenotransplant
1
0
2
To our reassurance, we found no presence of human B or T cells in the pig kidney biopsies (note, we had to use marker genes for B/T cells bc not in reference transcriptome)
1
0
0
Knowing what immune cells were present in the explanted kidney, we wanted to track these over time. We performed @10XGenomics Visium spatial transcriptomics on the serial biopsies and used the sc/snRNAseq data to deconvolute the spatial data using cell2location
1
0
2
We detected human neutrophils, monocytes, and macrophaes as well as pig T cells, neutrophils, and macrophages in the explanted pig kidney 3 days after xenotransplant.
1
0
2
Problem: how do you identify what is a pig cell vs human cell in a mixed sample of pig/humancells? Solution: We built a merged pig-human reference genome to align our sequencing data to, so we could distinguish species and cell types. (Many more details/methods in the paper!)
1
0
1