Scientists have developed a method thanks to which the recipient will be able to transplant a kidney from any living donor, and not as before – from a perfectly matched one. This will allow to increase the number of transplants and their popularization, for example, when the spouse wants to donate a kidney to his partner.
The kidneys, next to the liver, are organs that can be transplanted not only from dead but also living donors. Of course, one of the main conditions in this case is that the donor’s other kidney is working properly so that his health is not compromised. Nevertheless, even if there is a person who wants to donate among the relatives, it is not always possible due to tissue incompatibility. In practice, this means that when an organ is transplanted from an organism incompatible, the organism will either reject the organ as a foreign body or the opposite reaction will occur – graft versus host. In both cases, it poses a threat to the health and life of the sick person.
Chain transplants are a solution. These are procedures in which at least two donor-recipient pairs are associated, which are not compatible with each other in tissue, but donors agree to donate an organ to a “stranger” in return for the same favor for their loved one. Last year, such a procedure was performed for the first time in Poland and three couples took part in it: a son and a mother, a married couple and siblings.
Chain transplants are undoubtedly a huge advancement in medicine, but they do not fully meet the needs of recipients. At the end of December last year, 935 people were registered on the national list of patients waiting for a kidney transplant. A method developed at Johns Hopkins University may be a new hope for people with sick kidneys.
The technique is a kind of “desensitization” of the recipient. The term calls for a desensitization of the immune system to a specific allergen in common allergies. In practice, it involves resetting the recipient’s immune system so that it does not attack the transplant. This is possible due to the removal of antibodies from the body by filtering. In the next step, the patient is given other antibodies so that he is not completely defenseless against pathogens. After a while, the immune system builds up and the patient’s antibodies return. Interestingly, the reaction to a foreign kidney in a reset immune system is much milder.
The results of an eight-year experiment using this method have just been published and its effectiveness is really high. Of the patients who underwent a “reset” kidney transplant, as many as 77 percent are alive. In the control group, which also received the transplant, the survival rate is 63%.
Based on: http://www.nytimes.com/