Sean Agbor-Enoh

Dr. Sean Agbor is a physician scientist. He is lab chief of NHLBI Laboratory of Applied Precision Omics (APO), and also a Lasker Clinical Research Tenure Track Investigator, NIH Distinguish Scholar, and Director of the Genomic Research Alliance for Transplantation (GRAfT). Dr Agbor has a joint appointment and is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His research mission is to improve lung transplant survival by developing better diagnostics and therapies of transplant rejection: a complication which leads to poor median survival of only 6.5 years after lung transplantation.

APO has shown that a novel blood test, cell-free DNA, reliably identify organs affected by disease providing a whole-body molecular injury scan. In transplantation, cell-free DNA detects transplant rejection weeks to months earlier than the invasive gold standard, bronchoscopy plus biopsy in lung transplant and endomyocardial biopsy in heart transplant. His research group also proposed a surveillance protocol for using cell-free DNA instead of biopsy. This scientific work has been increasingly accepted, so that many US transplant centers are adopting the cell-free DNA protocols to monitor their patients. His lab has develop novel cell-free DNA approaches that can be used to identify end-organ involvement and risk stratify patients with In COVID-19, MIS-C, pulmonary hypertension and graft-versus-host disease.