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Novel Type 1 diabetes treatment involves pancreatic islet transplant without the need for immunosuppression

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In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Missouri, Georgia Tech and Harvard University has demonstrated the successful use of a novel Type 1 diabetes treatment in a large animal model. Their approach involves transplanting insulin-producing pancreas cells -; called pancreatic islets -; from a donor to a recipient, without the need of long-term immunosuppressive drugs.

In people living with Type 1 diabetes, their immune system can malfunction, causing it to attack itself, said Haval Shirwan, a professor of child health and molecular microbiology and immunology in the MU School of Medicine, and one of the study’s lead authors.
Read more in News Medical Life Science.

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Older living kidney donor age may be negative predictor of recipient, graft survival

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Compared with living donors aged 50 to 70 years, donor age older than 70 years may be a negative predictor of kidney transplant and graft survival, according to a presentation at the American Transplant Congress.

“I set out to see if the data and outcomes of a national cohort met my anecdotal findings that living kidney donor transplants from donors [older than] 70 years don’t perform as well compared to their younger donor counterparts regardless of measured donor GFR and noted that this had not been studied in a contemporary cohort in the past 10 years,” Adam Bregman, MD, MBA, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of nephrology and hypertension at the University of Minnesota, told Healio. Read more in Healio.

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A new storage technique could vastly expand the number of livers available for transplant

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It allows donor livers to be held for days—significantly longer than the standard now–and even treated if they are damaged.

A patient who received a donated liver that had been stored for three days in a new type of machine that mimics the human body is healthy one year on from surgery, according to a study in Nature Biotechnology. The technology could significantly increase the number of livers suitable for transplant, the authors claim, both by enabling donor livers to be preserved for longer than the current standard and by making it possible to repair organs that are available but too damaged to transplant as is. Read the full story from MIT Technology Review.

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Returning To Work After Catastrophic Illness: Grace Under Pressure

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Grace Rosenback had been enjoying her work as a presentation designer at an advertising company when her health issues took center stage. She was diagnosed with myocarditis in October 2019 and faced heart transplant surgery. She felt a lot of uncertainty about her future and what to expect.

Her journey through health and work issues included accessing her long-term disability (LTD) insurance, applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits, and eventually returning to work through the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Ticket to Work program. Read the complete article in Forbes.

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Infusion Improves Post-Kidney Transplant Renal Function

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For recipients of kidney transplant who received an infusion of dexmedetomidine, early postoperative renal function was improved, according to a study published in Annals of Medicine. However, total vessel density was not greatly different between the intervention and control groups. Yu-Change Yeh, MD, PhD, and colleagues randomly assigned transplant recipients to a control group or dexmedetomidine group. Read more in Physician’s Weekly.

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Is a Bioengineered Heart From Recipient Tissues the Answer to the Shortage of Donors in Heart Transplantation?

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With the increase in life expectancy worldwide, end-organ failure is becoming more prevalent. In addition, improving post-transplant outcomes has contributed to soaring demand for organs. Unfortunately, thousands have died waiting on the transplant list due to the critical shortage of organs. The success of bioengineered hearts may eventually lead to the production of limitless organs using the patient’s own cells that can be transplanted into them without the need for immunosuppressive medications. Despite being in its infancy, scientists are making tremendous strides in “growing” an artificial heart in the lab. We discuss these processes involved in bioengineering a human-compatible heart in this review. The components of a functional heart must be replicated in a bioengineered heart to make it viable. This review aims to discuss the advances that have already been made and the future challenges of bioengineering a human heart suitable for transplantation. Read the full article in Cureus.

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Are Lung Transplant Patients More Prone to Cancer?

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A lung transplant involves replacing a diseased lung with a healthy lung from a donor. Surgeons can swap out one or both lungs during this operation. Transplantation is an option for people with failing lungs due to a variety of health conditions. If a lung transplant is successful, it can offer many patients a longer, better quality of life.1

However, there are also serious risks to consider, including a higher chance of developing certain types of cancer after the transplantation. This risk is attributed to conventional risk factors, such as a history of smoking in both recipients and donors, and to immunosuppression after transplantation.2 Read the full article in Verywell Health.

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Immunosuppression Adherence in Pediatric Kidney Transplant

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Following solid-organ transplantation, the primary aim of care is preventing allosensitization. Despite potent immunosuppression, nonadherence often disrupts treatment, resulting in rejection. Among recipients of kidney transplant, the strongest predictors of allograft failure are nonadherence and subsequent antibody or T-cell-mediated rejection (AMR and TCMR, respectively). Read more in Nephrology Times.

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Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplant Outcomes Improve With Diverse Gut Microbes, Immune Cells

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NEW YORK – A team from Weill Cornell Medical College, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and elsewhere has demonstrated that interactions between the gut microbial community and the immune system can influence an individual’s response to a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and other blood conditions.

Past studies have suggested ties between microbial diversity and favorable allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HCT) outcomes, or transplants involving stem cells from healthy donors. For their new study, the researchers set out to characterize fecal microbiome features alongside immune cell features and clinical outcomes in allo-HCT recipients — work they presented in Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday.
Read more in GenomeWeb.

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