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What Happens in the Brain When an Organ Transplant is Rejected?

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The brain-organ connection is complex. Here’s what surgeons look for before, during and after a transplantation.

Livers outnumber people in Catherine Kling’s operating room at the University of Washington Medical Center. On this particular day, the extra organ — the only one ex-vivo, cleaned and sitting on ice — arrived just hours before the transplantation, the culmination of a thoughtful and time-consuming process of diagnoses, donor locating, evaluations and transportation, all sequenced by many expert pairs of eyes and hands. Read more.

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PREVENTING REJECTION

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“The daunting truth about organ failure is that it occurs in about 50 percent of all organ transplants. To help prevent rejection, transplant recipients must take highly-evolved immunosuppressive drugs, also known as anti-rejection drugs, for the rest of their lives to ensure their new organ is accepted by their body.”

Read more, here.

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Signs & Symptoms That Your Body is Rejecting Your Transplanted Kidney or Heart

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A person living with a transplanted organ can live a healthy and normal life.

However, to increase your chances of long-term success, experts say that immunosuppressants (anti-rejection medications) must be taken every day as directed.1

“A transplanted organ is seen as a foreign object—or an ‘unwelcome visitor’—by your body,” says Nikhil Agrawal, MD, a nephrologist with Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston. “That is why your body’s immune system works hard to react against—or ‘reject’—the transplanted organ. Immunosuppressants suppress your body’s immune system and prevent rejection.”

The signs and symptoms of rejection could differ based on your transplanted organ. Below are a few things to look out for if you are a kidney- or heart-transplant recipient.

Read the full article, here.

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Tonix Pharmaceuticals and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Enter into Research Collaboration on Tonix’s Third Generation anti-CD40-Ligand Monoclonal Antibody, TNX-1500, for the Treatment and Prevention of Kidney Transplant Rejection

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“Transplantation experts led by Tatsuo Kawai, M.D., Ph.D., Surgical Director of the Living Donor Transplantation and Dialysis Access Program at MGH and Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School (HMS) will study TNX-1500 in kidney transplantation in a variety of models including non-human primates. The goal of the collaboration is to advance TNX-1500 as a potential first-in-class therapeutic to prevent and treat kidney transplant rejection.

Dr. Kawai said, “Anti-CD40-ligand therapy has a unique activity in controlling the immune response to organ transplants.2 There remains a significant need for new treatments to reduce the toxicity of current treatments by more selectively suppressing immune responses or inducing specific tolerance to the transplanted organ. Anti-CD40-ligand has shown promise not only to effectively suppress rejection but also to facilitate ‘transplant tolerance’ in multiple preclinical transplant models.6”

Read full article, here.

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