SPF Baboons Case Study

Patients who underwent this procedure had to remain on immunosuppressive drugs for about 6 months to prevent the recipient’s immune system from destroying the donor cell. One out of seven patients that had this procedure done had a relapse because they stopped taking their immunosuppressant drug during the critical stage of treatment. This treatment has proven successful, but there still remains the concern of tissue rejection and other complication. Nevertheless, this approach still provides encouragement for people suffering with the disease.

Immunoglobulin is the name given to the groups of proteins within our blood plasma known as antibodies (Carpo, Pedotti, & Allaria, 1999). In high-dose immunoglobulin therapy, donated blood plasma with specific antibodies is intravenously administered in small quantities (400mg/kg) over the course of six days. The immune system naturally reacts and begins to regulate the immunity response by allowing the immune system the ability to inhibit autoantibodies and repress autoantibody production (Carpo et al., 1999). Immunoglobulin therapy since its introduction has been considered to be a safer treatment because of its reduced risks and complications (Kleyweg, & van der Meché, 1991). Studies have found that GBS patients have responded favourable to immunoglobulin therapy, where Kleyweg, and van der Meché (1991) discovered that along with supportive care, 93% of patients made full

A major issue today with heart transplants is the rejection of the donor heart. In some cases, the patient’s immune system only recognizes the new heart as a foreign object. In this particular instance, the patient will need to take some type of medication. Due to the new heart, their immune system will only see the donated heart as something that does not belong in their body and will fight it off which can be very serious.

A successful transplant procedure is comparable to winning a battle, surviving after the fact wins the war. Very rarely is there a pair of patients that are immunologically identical. Identical twins are usually immunologically identical, but what about the other ninety percent of the human race? Many years ago this was a problem. At that time, the next step was to expand the promise of organ transplantation to the much larger pool of patients. Physicians realized that tools were needed to control the immune system to prevent rejection of allogeneic organs. Year after year, physicians all over the world discovered more reliable ways, in hope to completely rule out rejection of allogeneic organs. In 2004, Roy Calne, Jean Borel, and David White discovered a compound, by the name of “Cyclosporine A.” This compound represents the single most dramatic advance in immunosuppression to date. This medical discovery offered a high degree of potency and immune specificity heretofore unimagined, which lowered the rates for the chances of acute rejection by a substantial

Their T cell levels were in line with normal controls and it appeared that almost 100% of the circulating T and NK cells had taken up the transgene. Their production of new T cells was normal and they had levels of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells consistent with levels of age-matched controls, although most were naïve (Figure 3). These four patients contained normal levels of antibodies against diseases they were vaccinated for including poliovirus, tetanus, diphtheria, and influenza. The fifth patient had no response to the gene therapy treatment. After 30 months, he had no detectable T cells in the blood and required an emergency HSCT. Overall, most patients that underwent gene therapy showed a functional immune system, improved clinical outcome, and the development of a thymus at 30 months after transfusion. The four successful patients saw appearance and number of T cells faster and higher than patients who had received HSCT. Considering that most of the T and NK cells contained the transgene, the researchers concluded that the expression of the c chain confers a survival and growth advantage [12].

After the transplant, both the patient and donor embark on long roads to recovery depending on the transplant performed. In general, if the surgery goes well, the patient still must face the possibility of rejection (where the body fights off the newly implanted organ). Rejection is harmful to transplant success because the body fights off the new organ by making proteins called antibodies that go to the new organ and try to kill it. In order to hold back the antibodies that threaten the new organ, transplant patients have to take power immunosuppressant drugs to keep the level of antibodies down low enough for the organ to integrate into the body and start working [22].

To overcome suppression of autologous NK cells, many groups have evaluated adoptive immunotherapy utilizing donor derived allogeneic NK cells. . The importance of NK cells in alloHSCT can be characterized by their role in mediating immune reconstitution, GVHD, disease relapse, and infection control22. As such, the importance of NK cells is underscored by the fact that they are the first

2000). In this studies, TBI was able to be avoided by administering a larger dose of PBSC (100x10^8 cells/kg). All these animals showed long term chimerism in the periphery and dendritic cell chimerism in the thymus. In vitro they were unresponsive to the donor and in vivo unresponsiveness was shown through donor skin graft prolongation. In addition, three of four animals accepted the donor SLA-matched kidney without immunosuppression. The fourth animal received a second donor-matched kidney since this animal remained donor unresponsive in vitro despite rejecting the first kidney. The kidney survived for more than 100 days and minor histocompatibility antigen difference was drawn as conclusion for the loss of the first kidney. Unfortunately, this protocol had high incidences of PTLD so a low dose of TBI (100 cGy) was added to the regimen although TI remained omitted for the achievement of chimerism in this model (Cina et al.

Pharmaceutical companies are regulated by the FDA and immunosuppression has become a common therapy since the early 1960’s when the drug azathioprine was applied in anti-rejection therapies, cyclosporine was introduced in the 1980’s, mycophenolate mofetil and tacrolimus followed in 1994. These four drugs known by the brand names: Imuran, Neoral, CellCept, and Prograf are the backbone of immue suppressant drugs and have given a myriad of transplant patients a second chance at life. Organ transplant recipients have lived over 30+ years past their transplant due to these name brand anti-rejection drugs in combination with other various steroids, which is a remarkable thing (Pellegrino.2). Not so remarkable, are the serious complications that exsist with all anti-rejection

Upon having the fear of our immune system rejecting said tissues and organs, there is also a risk of animal to human infectious diseases. This means that if there were to be a successful transplant from animal to human, there is a possibility that the animal donor has a virus that would be transmitted to the human recipient after transplantation. This is a huge concern because it can not only become a threat to the recipient’s health, but it can create a public health epidemic, spreading whatever virus or disease the animal had throughout the public. The reason for this is due to the possibility of organisms that are unrecognizable gaining the possibility of spreading to one person to another, much like what happened with HIV. With xenotransplantation, certain organs can develop certain infections within the human body. For example, people who undergo heart transplants are at risk of having a pulmonary infection, same goes for liver transplants having a risk of abdominal infections as well as other organ

Even before the recent studies reported today, there are already proposed and used treatments to cure heart failure. Several surgical methods are applied to patients but unfortunately, these methods do not offer a 100% cure to heart failure. The only surgical solution for cardiomyocytes loss in a patient with heart failure is the cardiac transplantation. But as reported

When a patient is exposed to rejection, the circulatory system which provides enough oxygen and nutrients throughout the body is disrupted. Thereof, the immune system is prompt to attack any foreign antigens. With this, modern immunosuppression drugs mediated to deactivate the immune system have helped minimize the rate of mortality and morbidity in rejection after heart transplant. Few of these are:-

The heart is so important to our bodies and without it, it would be impossible for us to survive. Unfortunately, there are certain types of diseases/illnesses that can lead someone to require a heart transplant in order for them to survive. These conditions can include dilated cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease,

Thrombosis has been regarded as a main hurdle in transplantable whole organ engineered grafts. Therefore, an optimal recellularization methods would be at the forefront of diminishing thrombosis in the long term. In practice, lack of re-endothelialization of the heterotopic transplanted heart induced thrombosis [54]. H. Kitahara and colleagues have recently demonstrated the first heterotopic transplantation of an acellular and recellularized of the whole porcine heart fabricating by the perfusion system. They have administered two potential recellularization procedure to determine which of them contributed to prevent thrombosis. The first one was a coronary perfusion technique, in which the cell was delivered evenly throughout the whole heart. The second other method was a direct injection of the cell source. In that report, a whole porcine heart initially perfused with 1% SDS 1% triton X100 was added to remove cell debris, the process took less time (13h) as compared to the time required in another

Physicians today are faced with a growing list of patients awaiting transplants for organs that have failed, but there are not enough donors to meet these needs. Countries all over the world have a “human organ shortage” and the waiting lists for organ transplants only seem to grow longer (Melo 427). In the United States 62,000 patients needed a kidney, liver, or pancreatic transplant in the year 2001. Xenotransplantation, which refers to the transplantation of organs, cells, or tissues from animal species into human beings, has been heralded as a promising technology that will help us save more lives and lessen the dire shortage of transplantable organs.