Posted on 01/24/2008 12:03:26 PM PST by CarrotAndStick
LOS ANGELES: In what's being called a major advance in organ transplants, doctors say they have developed a technique that could free many patients from having to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.
The treatment involved weakening the patient's immune system, then giving the recipient bone marrow from the person who donated the organ. In one experiment, four of five kidney recipients were off immune-suppressing medicines up to five years later.
"There's reason to hope these patients will be off drugs for the rest of their lives," said Dr David Sachs of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the research.
Since the world's first transplant more than 50 years ago, scientists have searched for ways to trick the body to accept a foreign organ as its own. Immune-suppressing drugs that prevent organ rejection came into wide use in the 1980s. But they raise the risk of cancer, kidney failure and many other problems. And they have unpleasant side effects such as excessive hair growth, bloating and tremors.
Eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs is "a huge advance", said Dr Suzanne Ildstad, a University of Louisville immunology specialist who had no role in the work. "It still needs some fine-tuning so that everyone who gets treated gets the same consistent outcome ... It's not the holy grail of tolerance yet," she cautioned.
The results do not mean that it is safe for current transplant patients to go off their medicines. Doing so could lead to organ rejection and even death, doctors warn. And Sachs said the treatment will not solve the problems of organ shortage in the US. In the 1990s, Sachs showed the treatment could work in a kidney recipient who was a good genetic match. The woman, who had an organ and marrow transplant in 1998, has not needed anti-rejection drugs for a decade.
The new study involved five people who got kidneys from parents or siblings who had slightly different tissue types from the patients. Since many kidney transplants are similarly mismatched, there is hope more people might one day be spared immune-suppressing drugs.
Sachs' treatment involved weakening each kidney patient's immune system with intravenous drugs several days before the transplant. After the transplant, the patient got an infusion of marrow from the donor to create a new immune system. The stem cells from the marrow reprogram the body by allowing new immune cells to grow that don't try to attack the donated organ.
Three articles below this is article about a liver changing a girl’s blood type.
Interesting.
Amazing. If this continues to work out, its real big. Rejection is a big problem for recipients.
Yes, it was me who had posted that one.
This is good news for those needing transplants.
“Sachs’ treatment involved weakening each kidney patient’s immune system with intravenous drugs several days before the transplant. After the transplant, the patient got an infusion of marrow from the donor to create a new immune system. The stem cells from the marrow reprogram the body by allowing new immune cells to grow that don’t try to attack the donated organ.”
I wonder if this meant the patient lost all previous protection from vaccines or picked the marrow donor’s set?
A few years ago my oldest dog was given cyclosporin in eyedrop form; when I asked why, the vet explained that the drug was approved for that use; I can only think the infection might have been from a foreign body that had somehow got in the eye.
Still don’t rightly know.
This is awesome news.
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