Residual Immune Response toward Decellularized Allografts may be Highly Individual

Objectives: Decellularized homograft valves (DHV) have shown promising clinical results, particularly in the treatment of congenital heart disease. However, there is a subset of young patients, who seem to elicit an immune response. As decellularization is quality controlled for each DHV, we hypothesized that there may be residual immunogenicity within the extracellular matrix of DHV.