Transplant Tumor Registry Hits 4,000 Consults

CINCINNATI—An international registry of patient data established in 1968 has reached 4,000 consults from transplantation physicians and care providers across the world.

The University of Cincinnati (UC) transplant team with the Israel Penn International Transplant Tumor Registry (IPITTR) made the 4,000th consult late last week to a physician from St. Mary’s Kidney Transplant Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., for a pre-transplant patient with an invasive lung carcinoma.

The registry is the largest and most comprehensive resource of its kind in the world, providing data on transplant recipients and donors who have had or developed malignances during their treatment.

It was founded by Israel Penn, MD, as the Denver Transplant Tumor Registry, when Penn was the first person to report on the increased incidence of malignancy following transplantation.

Through his career, Penn collected data on more than 15,000 patients for the voluntary registry and published more than 300 works on malignancy in transplantation.

Following Penn's move to UC, the registry was renamed the Cincinnati Transplant Tumor Registry. After his death in 1999, it was named the Israel Penn International Transplant Tumor Registry (IPITTR).

Now it serves as a resource for the transplant community, providing substantive data to the transplant community for research and consultative assistance to clinicians caring to transplant patients. 

"The Penn registry's consultative services helps individual patients immediately and directly through clinical care activities," says E. Steve Woodle, MD, director of UC’s transplant division and member of the IPITTR board of directors. "The second dimension of the registry positively impacts patients worldwide via clinical research activities. IPITTR consults provide a unique combination of these dimensions. "

Today, IPITTR houses data submitted by more than 700 transplant centers around the world, with 400 of those in the United States. The data comprises a full medical picture of patients with transplant-related tumors.

Using that data, along with information from Penn’s and others’ published works, IPITTR staff are able to provide more than 500 consultations a year for transplant caregivers. Information provided by the IPITTR is not intended to be the sole basis for treatment, but rather to complement the physician’s own knowledge and judgment.

For researchers, IPITTR holds data available for descriptive reports, multi-variate analyses and clinical trials and produces publications analyzing that data for the transplant community.

"Our team frequently relies on the expertise and knowledge of IPITTR when evaluating potential transplant patients that have been diagnosed with a malignancy,” says Isaac Payne, a registered nurse and the Kidney/Pancreas Transplant Coordinator at the University of Kentucky. "We feel that the Penn registry's recommendations are essential when considering a patient for transplantation due to their experience and extensive research data regarding malignancies and organ transplantation.”

"While the IPITTR patient consults are useful for individual patients," says Woodle, "the knowledge gained from collective analyses of data from these consults allows an enhanced understanding of the risks associated with transplantation of patients with a history of cancer."