Good news on the Organ Donation front today.... Chicago Tribune article by Judith Graham
Yeah for stem cells!
A new transplant technique has enabled five kidney recipients to survive for several years without taking drugs that suppress their immune systems, scientists reported Thursday.
Doctors produced the groundbreaking result by injecting transplant recipients with blood stem cells taken from their donors' bone marrow. The stem cells multiplied and protected the transplanted organ from an immune system attack.
Normally, recipients must follow a lifelong regimen of immunosuppressant drugs for their transplanted organs to survive. Those drugs greatly increase the risk of infections, cancer, high blood pressure and other serious medical problems.
The cost of the drugs is a very expensive component of post-transplant complications, that and the fact that they mess with your system and cause all these complications that can lead to the organ failing and need a new replacement! The cool thing too is that the donor doesn't even need to be a close match to the recipient ( HLA types etc). Soon this could help people already on the list who are waiting for a kidney from a non-living donor because if they did have a potential donor (but they didn't match!) now they might be able to go forward with it. The insurance companies should be all over this because they are going to save a ton of money not having to pay out for all those multiple drug prescriptions that normally would have been necessary to take for the rest of that kidney recipient's life!
I'm going to send this to my friends at Gift of Hope. (BTW the researchers in this study used bone marrow blood stem cells NOT embryonic stem cells.)
Also, if you haven't signed up yet to be an organ donor in your state - DO IT ! (if you live in IL go here: https://www.iamareyou.org/
Data by state & how many people are waiting, and dying (!) because not enough people choose to donate
:~(
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