In the U.S. more than 110,000 people are waiting for an organ. Every day 18 people die waiting for a transplant. While the number of people in need is great, those that receive a transplant don’t get any guarantees.
There is a chance a patient’s body will reject the organ. To help curb that possibility, doctors use a series of anti-rejection medications. These meds have serious side effects and need to be taken for long periods of time; however, researchers at Johns Hopkins believe they have found a way to change that.
A new possibility
“It is the dream for all scientists in the transplant field to erase the need for lifelong immunosuppressant drugs,” says study leader Zhaoli Sun, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Currently, if a patient survives for 10 or 20 years with a new liver, that organ is still seen as foreign inside its new body because immunosuppression puts blinders on the immune system that must stay on to prevent rejection. Our idea was to find a way to turn that organ into something that ‘belongs’ and is never at risk of rejection.”
Right now researchers are testing a combination of a very low, short-term immunosuppressive drug to prevent immediate rejection and a medication that stimulates the recipient’s stem cells inside their bone marrow. Researchers injected rats with this drug combo and found just one week of the medication kept rats from rejecting a transplanted liver.
What it could mean for us
“In our study, the risk of organ rejection is eventually eliminated because the liver is no longer a foreign object, but comprised of many of the recipient’s own cells,” Sun says. “Once the recipient’s stem cells take over, the body sees the regenerated liver as its own and works to protect it, not attack it.”
Within three months, Sun and his colleagues found that the majority of the liver cells in the transplanted organ belonged to the recipient, not the donor.
If research continues to show success, clinical trials on humans would be next.
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