HEARTBiT: Multi-Marker Blood Test for Acute Cardiac Transplant Rejection (HEARTBiT)

April 28, 2026 updated by: Scott Tebbutt, University of British Columbia

HEARTBiT: A Novel Multi-Marker Blood Test for Management of Acute Cardiac Allograft Rejection

Heart transplantation is a life saving therapy for people with end stage heart failure. Acute rejection, a process where the immune system recognizes the transplanted heart as foreign and mounts a response against it, remains a clinical problem despite improvements in immunosuppressive drugs. Acute rejection occurs in 20-30% of patients within the first 3 months post-transplant, and is currently detected by highly invasive heart tissue biopsies that happen 12-15 times in the first year post-transplant. Replacing the biopsy with a simple blood test is of utmost value to patients and will reduce healthcare costs. The goal of our project is to develop a new blood test to monitor heart transplant rejection. Advances in biotechnology have enabled simultaneous measurement of many molecules (e.g., proteins, nucleic acids) in blood, driving the development of new diagnostics. Our team is a leader in using computational tools to combine information from numerous biological molecules and clinical data to generate "biomarker panels" that are more powerful than existing diagnostic tests. Our sophisticated analytic methods has recently derived HEARTBiT, a promising test of acute rejection comprising 9 RNA biomarkers, from the measurement of 30,000 blood molecules in 150 Canadian heart transplant patients. Our objective is to study a custom-built HEARTBiT test in a setting and on a technology that enable clinical adoption. We will evaluate the new test on 400 new patients from 5 North American transplant centres. We will also track patients' HEARTBiT scores over time to help predict future rejection, and explore use of proteins and micoRNAs to improve HEARTBiT. Our work will provide the basis for a future clinical trial. The significance of this work rests in that it will provide a tool to identify acute cardiac rejection in a fast, accurate, cost-effective and minimally invasive manner, allowing for facile long-term monitoring and therapy tailoring for heart transplant patients.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Detailed Description

Rationale:

Cardiac transplantation remains the main intervention for those with end-stage heart failure. Maintenance immunosuppression is given to all transplant recipients to prevent acute rejection and loss of the allograft. Despite great improvements in immunosuppressive therapies, acute rejection remains a clinical problem and occurs at varying severity in 20-30% of patients within the first 3 months post-transplant. Timely detection of moderate rejection allows for treatment to be modified, preventing organ damage, graft failure and patient death. The current method to monitor for rejection remains the endomyocardial biopsy (EMB), a highly invasive and costly procedure that poses physical risks and emotional stress to patients, who must undergo 12-15 such tests during the first year post-transplant. EMB detects rejection only when tissue damage has occurred, and lacks sensitivity as it provides information about tiny pieces of the endomyocardium. Clearly, patients and clinicians would benefit from an effective, cheaper, less invasive diagnostic test that can indicate when an EMB is not needed.

Our team used unbiased omics strategies and computational tools to identify potential biomarkers of treatable acute rejection (ISHLT grade 2R or higher) in peripheral blood. We hypothesize that there are distinctive RNA and protein signatures in blood that can be developed into a simple test to accurately indicate when heart transplant patients do not require EMB, and that studying these biomarkers in a clinically relevant setting will facilitate clinical adoption.

Our Specific Aims are to:

  1. Evaluate the performance of HEARTBiT, a custom 9-mRNA biomarker test developed on the NanoString platform, in an environment suitable for clinical translation, on >4000 newly collected samples from 400 patients across North America
  2. Examine the biomarker panel score and individual biomarkers serially across the first year post-transplant to identify predictive signatures of rejection and characterize underlying biology
  3. Develop and assess 5 promising protein biomarker candidates on NanoString, test 7 candidate miRNAs, and evaluate combinatorial RNA-protein classifier performance metrics to improve HEARTBiT

Expertise: Our team at the Centre of Excellence for Prevention of Organ Failure has over 10 years experience in computational analysis of omics and clinical data to create biomarker tests that out-perform current gold standards. Our Biomarkers in Transplantation (BiT) study has been continuously funded by competitive grants, philanthropy and industry between 2004-2017 and has generated many publications related to heart and kidney transplant rejection. Via our collaborators, we will have access to a Canadian Blood Services facility for testing our biomarkers, and patient samples from 5 major transplant sites (St. Paul's/Vancouver, Toronto, Nebraska, Newark Beth Israel, Duke).

Outcomes: The HEARTBiT test will be ready for clinical utility studies. The test will have significant clinical and socioeconomic value by reducing EMBs for transplant patients and enabling the tailoring of therapy. Insights into the biology of immune rejection will also be enhanced.

Study Type

Observational

Enrollment (Actual)

196

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • Canada
    • British Columbia
      • Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6Z 1Y6
        • St. Paul's Hospital
    • Ontario
      • Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1Y4W7
        • Ottawa Heart Institute
      • Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5G 2C4
        • Toronto General Hospital UHN
  • United States
    • Nebraska
      • Omaha, Nebraska, United States, 68198
        • University of Nebraska Medical Center

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

15 years and older (Adult, Older Adult)

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Sampling Method

Non-Probability Sample

Study Population

It is anticipated that up to 400 heart transplant recipients will be enrolled as participants. Given the prevalence of treatable AR observed at the recruiting sites, 40-50 AR and 350 NR/MR are expected, excluding the time course (first year post-transplant) samples. Additionally, we plan on enrolling 30 normal control subjects. Comparisons will be made between AR, MR, and NR samples from independent patients.

Description

Heart Transplant Subjects:

Inclusion Criteria

  • recipients who are ≥ 19 years of age
  • willing and able to provide informed consent

Exclusion Criteria

  • recipients under 19 years of age
  • recipients who have received multiple, different solid organ transplants (i.e. a heart and a kidney)
  • recipients who are HIV positive
  • recipients of organs from donors who test positive for HIV

Normal Subjects:

Inclusion Criteria

  • all individuals who are ≥ 19 years of age
  • willing and able to provide informed consent

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Observational Models: Cohort
  • Time Perspectives: Prospective

Cohorts and Interventions

Group / Cohort
Acute Rejection (AR)
Heart transplant patients diagnosed with an ISHLT grade 2R or 3R via endomyocardial biopsy.
Mild Rejection (MR)
Heart transplant patients diagnosed with an ISHLT grade 1R via endomyocardial biopsy.
Non-Rejection (NR)
Heart transplant patients diagnosed with an ISHLT grade 0R via endomyocardial biopsy.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Comparison of the HEARTBiT Biomarker Panel Score (BPS) between acute rejection and non-rejection/mild-rejection samples on the NanoString platform.
Time Frame: Within 5 years
The performance of HEARTBiT, a custom 9-RNA biomarker assay developed on the NanoString platform, will be evaluated in an environment suitable for clinical translation using a sample size of ~4000 newly collected samples from 400 HT patients. Performance will be assessed by applying an algorithm that combines the quantitative data of the 9 RNA into a single BPS. This score aggregates the influence of all RNAs and will be associated with an estimated probability that AR is occurring in the transplant recipient. The algorithm will establish a single cutoff thus producing a final binary test result (AR or NR/MR), or, if possible, two cutoffs to separate AR, MR and NR as ordered variables.
Within 5 years

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

University of British Columbia

Collaborators

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
Duke University
St. Paul's Hospital, Canada
University of Nebraska
Toronto General Hospital
PROOF Centre of Excellence

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Scott Tebbutt, PhD, University of British Columbia

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

August 9, 2018

Primary Completion (Actual)

December 30, 2025

Study Completion (Actual)

March 30, 2026

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

June 19, 2018

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

June 29, 2018

First Posted (Actual)

July 3, 2018

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

May 4, 2026

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

April 28, 2026

Last Verified

April 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • PROOF

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

UNDECIDED

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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