New procedure for Transplant Recipients
Microscope
As a transplant recipient (Cadavar Kidney, 2003), I understand the rote system of taking immunosuppressants each and every day. The total number of pills I take is only ten, and only 2 are immunosuppressants. Still, I understand.
One sign of hope lies in a promising new experimental procedure developed by Dr. David Sachs, head of the Transplant Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. In a small trial, Sachs was able to achieve immune-system tolerance in several transplant patients completely without using immunosuppressive drugs.
Sachs’s procedure involves partially destroying the patient’s bone marrow before the transplant to reduce the number of cells involved in organ rejection. Searl, one organ recipient, went through the protocol in 2002 with a kidney donated by her mother. During transplant surgery, her mother’s bone marrow was injected into one of Searl’s blood vessels, in the hope that Searl’s immune system would achieve “mixed chimerism,” essentially a state in which a patient’s immune system takes on some of the characteristics of the donor’s.
This is exciting news for the world of transplantation! I first heard of this from the University of Utah, who were carrying out this study first around 1999-2002.
Dr. Maria Siemionow, who heads the microsurgical research team that performed the face-transplant procedure at the Cleveland Clinic, is pursuing another research track. In her animal lab, she’s begun a series of rat experiments designed to trick a host immune system to recognize transplanted tissue as self. She has identified an antibody—a type of protein that links to an invader and repels it—that allows the host immune system to tolerate transplanted tissues without the need for long-term immunosuppression. So far, these rats have achieved immune tolerance for as long as two years.
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