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Battling rejectionTransplanting White Blood Cells With New Organ Could Avert Need for Drug Regimen.

Posted on: Friday, 30 December 2005, 18:00 CST

White blood cells, the soldiers of the human immune system, are notoriously unforgiving to transplanted organs. It doesn't matter that a new heart, kidney, lung or liver would keep the body going. Without anti-rejection drugs, the immune system can and does destroy the body's would-be saviors.

But anti-rejection drugs are costly, inconvenient and bring troublesome side effects -- painful warts, excess facial hair and increased risk of cancer and osteoporosis.

For people who depend on these drugs to live, news of a budding treatment regimen that could render them unnecessary should be an encouraging sign.

That regimen follows a simple principle. If white blood cells are the culprit in rejecting transplanted organs, kill them off. Then, just before the new organ is implanted, inject bone marrow from the organ donor into the new host body. In a relatively short time, that marrow will generate new white blood cells -- which won't consider the transplanted organ an enemy, for they all came from the same body.

Killing off the immune system, though, requires drug and radiation treatments. The patient must stay in a sterile environment for weeks. And, as a recent Associated Press article noted, the regimen proved so painful for a now 26-year-old woman who received a second donor kidney using the new procedure (her first one had failed) that she "could only moan for morphine."

But two months after the 2002 surgery, the woman returned to a normal life -- and has been completely free of anti-rejection drugs. The AP reports that she now tells people "it's a month of suffering for a lifetime of normal."

Even a month of suffering may be too much. Some doctors say the strategy of replacing the immune system itself could kill some patients. So this approach may remain rare for some time.

But as the technique is improved, people who need transplants have a glimmer of hope -- assuming they win the race against time to find an acceptable organ -- that their pre-illness quality of life might one day return. Good luck to researchers and doctors engaged in this task.

Source: Omaha World - Herald

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