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Graft survival beyond year 1 has not changed after orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT) over the last decades. Likewise, OLT causes comorbidities such as infection, renal impairment and cancer. We evaluated our single‐center real‐world individualized immunosuppression program after OLT, based on 211 baseline surveillance biopsies (svLbx) without any procedural complications. Patients were classified as low, intermediate and high rejection risk based on graft injury in svLbx and anti‐HLA donor‐specific antibodies. While 32% of patients had minimal histological inflammation, 57% showed histological inflammation and 23% advanced fibrosis (>F2), which was not predicted by lab parameters. IS was modified in 79% of patients after svLbx. After immunosuppression reduction in 69 patients, only 5 patients showed ALT elevations and three of these patients had a biopsy‐proven acute rejection, two of them related to lethal comorbidities. The rate of liver enzyme elevation including rejection was not significantly increased compared to a svLbx control cohort prior to the initiation of our structured program. Immunosuppression reduction led to significantly better kidney function compared to this control cohort. In conclusion, a biopsy guided personalized immunosuppression protocol after OLT can identify patients requiring lower immunosuppression or patients with graft injury in which IS should not be further reduced.

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Autoimmune liver diseases (AILD), namely autoimmune hepatitis (AIH), primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) and primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), are rare diseases. These days, patients with PBC almost never require liver transplantation. When treated early with ursodeoxycholic acid patients have a normal life expectancy if the disease is diagnosed at an early stage and the patients respond to treatment. Patients with AIH often go into remission with first‐line therapy including corticosteroids alone or in combination with azathioprine. Nevertheless, about one quarter of patients already developed cirrhosis at diagnosis. Those who do not respond to first line standard of care (SOC) have significant liver‐related morbidity and mortality. No approved second‐ or third‐line treatments are available and the drugs are selected based on limited case series and personal experience. Larger trials are needed to develop efficient therapies for difficult‐to‐treat AIH patients. No treatment has been found to alter the natural course of disease in patients with PSC except for liver transplantation. Identifying PSC patients at risk of developing cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is another unmet need. Current research in all AILD including AIH, PBC and PSC, focuses on improving our understanding of the underlying disease process and identifying new therapeutic targets to decrease morbidity and mortality.

Background & Aims: Detection of autoantibodies is a mainstay of diagnosing autoimmune hepatitis (AIH). However, conventional autoantibodies for workup of AIH lack either sensitivity or specificity leading to substantial diagnostic uncertainty. We aimed to identify more accurate serological markers of AIH with a protein macro-array. Approach & results: During the search for more precise autoantibodies to distinguish AIH from non-AIH liver diseases, IgG antibodies with binding capacities to many human and foreign proteins were identified with a protein macroarray and confirmed with solid phase ELISAs in AIH patients. Subsequently, polyreactive IgG (pIgG) were exemplarily quantified by reactivity against human huntingtin-interacting protein 1related protein in bovine serum albumin blocked ELISA (HIP1R/BSA). Diagnostic fidelity of HIP1R/BSA binding pIgG to diagnose AIH was assessed in a retrospective training, a retrospective multicenter validation and a prospective validation cohort, in cryo-conserved samples from 1568 adults from ten centers from eight countries. Reactivity against HIP1R/BSA had a 25% and 14% higher specificity to diagnose AIH than conventional anti-nuclear and antismooth muscle antibodies, a significantly higher sensitivity than liver kidney microsomal antibodies and anti-soluble liver antigen/liver pancreas antigen and a 12-20% higher accuracy than conventional autoantibodies. Importantly, HIP1R/BSA reactivity was present in up to 88 % of patients with seronegative AIH and in up to 71% of AIH patients with normal IgG levels. Under therapy pIgG returns to background levels of non-AIH liver diseases. Conclusions: pIgG could be used as a new promising marker to improve the diagnostic workup of liver diseases with a higher specificity for AIH compared to conventional autoantibodies and a utility in autoantibody negative AIH. Likewise, pIgG could be a major source of assay interference in untreated AIH.

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