New kidney transplant approach could eliminate need for immune drugs, report finds
A new kidney transplant approach has spared three children with a very rare genetic disorder from needing anti-rejection medication.
Three children who have undergone kidney transplants in California will likely be spared from ever having to take anti-rejection medication, because of an innovative technique that eliminates the need for lifelong immunosuppression, ground-breaking new research suggests.
Scientists at Stanford Medicine detailed the cases Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. All three children have an extremely rare genetic disease called Schimke immuno-osseous dysplasia, or SIOD, that often destroys a person’s ability to fight off infection and leads to kidney failure. In each case, a parent donated stem cells taken from bone marrow, as well as a kidney.
About three years after the transplants, the children have normal kidney and immune system function. The technique — called a dual immune/solid organ transplant — involves a stem cell transplant that trains the immune system not to reject a subsequent kidney donation. The protocol used at Stanford isn’t new, but its success is.
Though SIOD is so rare — estimated to affect just a few dozen children worldwide — experts in the field of kidney transplantation say the results seen in these kids holds tremendous promise for transplants in general.
“There is no organ transplant, whether it’s kidney, liver, pancreas, lung, heart, that doesn’t have the same long-term complications from the body’s very effective immune system,” said Dr. Amit Tevar, surgical director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
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