US scientists develop transplant without anti-rejection drugs - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

US scientists develop transplant without anti-rejection drugs - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

US scientists develop transplant without anti-rejection drugs
Posted 8 hours 46 minutes ago

Scientists in the United States say they have developed a new transplant technique in which patients do not need to take drugs to enable their bodies to accept new organs.

They say they have successfully transplanted kidneys into five patients, four of whom were able to stop taking the anti-rejection drugs.

One of the biggest problems facing people who receive organ transplants is the fact that they have to take immmuno-suppressant drugs for the rest of their lives.

While the drugs prevent rejection of the organ, they leave the patients vulnerable to a wide range of infections that often prove fatal.

The scientists say the key to the breakthrough is that doctors transplanted some of the donor's bone marrow as well as the kidney.

They first killed off mature immune cells in the recipient.

They then transplanted the kidney and the bone marrow.

When the recipient's immune system recovered, it treated the foreign organ as part of itself.

-BBC