Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:
Worldwide, more than three million people lose their lives each year to lung-damaging conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or cystic fibrosis.1 In contrast, fewer than 5,000 individuals per year are fortunate enough to receive life-saving lung transplants.2 Transplant recipients still face many challenges, however, including a lifetime of immunosuppressant medications with potentially severe side effects and a more than 40 percent transplant failure rate in the first five years.3
In a recent study in Science Translational Medicine, transplantation immunologist Rainer Blasczyk and his team at the Hannover Medical School presented a potential solution to these problems in a minipig model.4 Instead of administering immunosuppressants, which Blasczyk likened to blinding the patient’s immune system, leaving the individual vulnerable to infections and even certain types of cancer, the researchers suppressed key immune proteins in the donor lung, rendering it immunologically invisible.5 Modifying the organ instead of the recipient isn’t a new idea, but it is an important one, said Jeffrey Platt, a transplantation biologist at the University of Michigan Medical School who was not involved in this work. “If you can introduce something that will affect the donor organ, then you can preserve the immune system of the recipient. And in lung transplantation, that’s really important because the lung is one of the first targets of infectious organisms.”
More here.
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