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During the congress, E-Posters will be accessible to all participants on the congress website 24/7, as well as in the E-poster stations in the congress center.
Preparing your E-Poster
Please review the E-Poster format requirements carefully when preparing your E-Poster. Should your E-Poster not meet the mentioned requirements, it may not be displayed as described above.
E-Poster Submission Deadline
Please prepare and upload your E-Poster no later than March 14, 2026 11.59PM CET. After this date, you will no longer be able to prepare and upload your E-poster and it will not be displayed and accessible on the congress website.
Please follow the instructions below to input your abstract title.
Abstract titles should be brief and reflect the content of the abstract.
In Japan, the number of kidney transplant surgeries has been increasing. Improvements in surgical techniques and advances in immunosuppressive therapy have led to better graft and recipient survival. However, the leading cause of death among kidney transplant recipients is infection. Kidney transplant recipients are uniquely susceptible to severe or chronic viral infections, and in recent years, severe COVID-19 has become a notable concern. The rs13050728 polymorphism is located in an intronic region of Interferon-alpha/beta receptor beta chain (IFNAR2) gene; carriers of the risk allele (C/T or T/T) have been reported to show enhanced IL-10 signaling, which contributes to COVID-19 severity compared with the wild-type C/C allele in genome-wide association studies. Not all recipients develop severe disease, and it remains unclear whether the risk factors for severity are the same as in the general population or if transplant-specific factors exist.
The study is a single center, retrospective, observational study to investigate the association between COVID-19 severity and the COVID-19 severity–associated polymorphism rs13050728. We analyzed 157 kidney transplant recipients who had a history of COVID-19 and provided informed consent among those attending Kyushu University Hospital between November 2023 and October 2025. Severe COVID-19 was defined by the need for oxygen therapy, development of organizing pneumonia, or prolonged viral positivity. Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood leukocytes, and a 278-bp fragment surrounding rs13050728 was amplified by polymerase chain reaction and subjected to sequencing. The Kyushu University Hospital Institutional Review Board for Clinical Research approved the protocol (no. 23271). Baseline characteristics in continuous variables were determined using the unpaired t-test; categorical variables were compared using the chi-square test.
There were 49 individuals with the C/C genotype, 71 with the C/T genotype, and 35 with the T/T genotype. Among the 157 patients who developed COVID-19, the allele frequency of rs13050728 was 0.449 for the C allele, which was similar to the previously reported frequency of 0.454 in the Japanese population. The mean age of the patients was 52 years, 56.7% were male, the body mass index was 22.9 kg/m², and the mean eGFR was 40.1 mL/min/1.73 m². There were no significant differences in these parameters between the C/C and C/T + T/T groups. Of the 157 patients, 30 developed severe disease. As age increased and kidney function declined, the incidence of severe COVID-19 increased. Compared with the C/C (wild) group, the C/T and T/T groups showed a significantly higher rate of severe disease. (p = 0.03).
In kidney transplant recipients receiving immunosuppressive therapy, the rs13050728 risk variant in IFNAR2 was associated with COVID-19 severity. This polymorphism may also serve as a potential marker for susceptibility to other viral infections in transplant recipients.
