New approach to transplant rejection shows promise in new study

Elizabeth Cooney is STAT’s cardiovascular disease reporter, covering heart, stroke and metabolic diseases. You can reach Liz on Signal at LizC.22.

Immune tolerance has long been the holy grail of transplant medicine, with the hope of overcoming the downsides of anti-rejection therapy for patients receiving life-saving organ transplants. A small, early-stage study has shown that harvesting cells from a living donor (someone who donates part of their liver) holds promise for teaching the recipient’s immune system to accept the foreign organ as its own, ultimately achieving a healthy outcome.

Living donation takes advantage of the liver’s ability to regenerate, allowing donors to give up part of their liver and watch it grow back later. Recipients can replace livers damaged by causes such as alcohol-related liver disease, metabolic-related liver disease, and liver cancer, and regain full liver function from a similarly growing partial organ. Immunosuppression prevents the body from rejecting new organs, but it also increases vulnerability to infections and certain cancers. Serious side effects from drugs include developing diabetes and kidney damage.

Cell therapy, which replenishes regulatory T immune cells harvested from donors to counteract immune system attacks, has been attempted in the past. In the new study, whose results were published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, a variety of immune cells known as regulatory dendritic cells were derived from donor white blood cells and generated in the lab. The idea behind both cell therapies is the same. The idea is to teach the recipient’s body’s immune cells to treat the donated liver fragments as familiar tissue, rather than an invader to be attacked.

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