Sayyad Ali

Supervisor(s): Dr. Ana Konvalinka
Award: KRESCENT Summer Studentship
Institution: University Health Network
Year: 2026
Project Title: A Step Toward Earlier Detection and Better Treatments

Biography

Sayyad Ali is a third-year Honours Health Sciences student at the University of Ottawa, pursuing a pre-medical pathway with a long-term interest in surgery. With experience in volunteer clinical research and involvement in cardiovascular and biomedical research projects, Sayyad has developed a strong foundation across both scientific and clinical environments. His academic interests span human physiology, chemistry, and anatomy, and he is passionate about the intersection of scientific inquiry and patient care. As a 2026 KRESCENT Summer Studentship recipient, Sayyad is eager to contribute to kidney research under the supervision of Dr. Ana Konvalinka at the University Health Network in Toronto, and to develop the skills necessary to become a future physician.

Lay Summary

More than 4 million Canadians live with kidney disease. For those whose kidneys stop working, a transplant is the best treatment available. It frees patients from dialysis and gives them a chance at a normal life. But transplants are hard to come by. Patients can wait years for a donor kidney. When one finally becomes available, protecting it becomes the most important goal.

But getting a transplant is not the end of the journey. The body's immune system can mistake the new kidney for a threat and attack it. One of the most dangerous forms of this attack is called antibody-mediated rejection, or AMR. In AMR, the immune system makes proteins called antibodies that damage the blood vessels inside the donated kidney.

Our team at Toronto General Hospital is working to understand exactly how this attack unfolds.

Purpose: We want to understand exactly how the immune system attacks a transplanted kidney during AMR. We are looking for the specific proteins on kidney blood vessel cells that trigger the attack. We are also measuring how immune cells carry out that attack. Our goal is to understand this process well enough to help guide the development of better treatments.

Method: We are working in three steps.

First, we grow human kidney blood vessel cells in the lab. These cells are the main target during AMR. Growing them in the lab lets us study the attack process in a controlled setting.

Second, we use a tool called flow cytometry to look at the proteins on the surface of these cells. Flow cytometry passes cells through a laser beam. The signals that bounce back tell us which proteins are present.

Third, we run tests called bioassays to measure how immune cells attack the vessel cells. These tests show us two types of attack — one where immune cells destroy the vessel cells, and one where they swallow them whole.

Anticipated Outcomes: We expect to identify which proteins on kidney blood vessel cells most strongly trigger the immune attack. We also hope to learn how immune cells carry out that attack — whether they destroy the vessel cells directly or engulf them. Understanding these steps will help researchers figure out where the rejection process can be interrupted and how future treatments might target it.

Relevance to Patients and Community: Losing a transplanted kidney is devastating. It means going back on dialysis or waiting years for another donor. This takes a serious toll on a patient's health, daily life, and mental well-being. Many patients do not get a second transplant. For some, losing their kidney means a much shorter life. Rejection is one of the leading reasons transplants fail over time. Rejection is often hard to stop once it takes hold. Our research is aimed at building a clearer picture of how it works, so that future treatments can target it more effectively. That directly improves a patient's chance of keeping their kidney and living well. This is what drives our work every day.

Conclusion: Kidney transplants save lives — but rejection puts those gains at risk for too many patients. Our team at Toronto General Hospital is studying the earliest steps of the immune attack to help change that. With support from the Kidney Foundation of Canada through the KRESCENT program, we are working toward a better understanding of rejection and how to treat it. Every patient who receives a kidney deserves the best possible chance of keeping it.