A first-of-its-kind surgery used cells from the donor’s immune system to help the recipient recognize the new heart as his own.
March 8, 2022, 5:15 PM UTCLast summer, Easton Sinnamon’s parents learned that surgery wouldn’t be enough to fix the leaky valve in his infant heart., which would typically mean he would need to remain on immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of his life, so that his body’s immune system didn’t reject the transplanted organ.
Turek and his team performed Easton’s heart transplant in August, when he was 6 months old. At the same time, they started to grow cells from the donor’s thymus in the lab. Two weeks later, they removed the infant’s thymus gland and replaced it with the cultured cells that had grown into a new gland in the lab.“You can form a brand new immune system, starting from scratch so this new organ can grow up together with that new thymus and be recognized as self,” he said.
Although transplant recipients can often lower their dose of immune-suppressing drugs over time, the medications can be toxic and lead to diabetes, kidney issues and even cancer. The drugs also make peopleRepeated rejections, which can still occur when people are on immunosuppressants, also put wear on the transplanted organ. For this reason, a donated heart lasts only around 10 to 15 years.
“If this is the first step in being able to do that with a simultaneous thymus transplant, that will potentially change the game in solid organ transplant,” Gibson said. If it is feasible, Gibson said that he still expects that it will be a long time before the procedure is available more widely — and some experts question whether it’s possible at all.