Friday, March 9, 2012

Organ transplants where the recipient is able to discontinue immunosuppressive drug use!

This is REALLY big news! It will be quite interesting to see what the follow-up studies report.

"Researchers have for the first time managed to give patients a complete bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor. The recipients were also able to accept kidneys from the same donors without the need for immunosuppressive drugs. Normally, such transplants would trigger graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) — an often deadly complication that occurs when immune cells from an unrelated donor attack the transplant recipient's tissue. The researchers report that five of eight people who underwent the treatment were able to stop all immunosuppressive therapy within a year after their kidney and stem-cell transplants, four of which came from unrelated donors (abstract)."

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/08/2159252/drug-free-organ-transplants-from-unrelated-donors