Word: organ
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Shocked but not surprised. That might be the best way to sum up India's reaction to the revelation this week that a black market organ transplant ring had been harvesting kidneys from poor Indian laborers, sometimes against their wishes, and using them in foreigners desperate for transplants. Police who busted the ring last week say doctors paid as little as $1000 for the kidneys and then sold them for as much as $37,500. The racket, based in Gurgaon, a business center close to the capital, New Delhi, drew victims from as many as eight Indian states and lasted...
...intriguing but small study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and New York Presbyterian Hospital may have finally come up with an end run around organ rejection. They report on four kidney-transplant patients who were able to wean themselves off powerful antirejection drugs within a year of their transplants (a fifth rejected his kidney). Even more exciting is the fact that while the organ donors in the study were family members of the recipients, they were not perfect tissue matches...
...drugs that target and eliminate these cells to wipe the immune slate clean. Then the team transplanted the kidney along with donor bone-marrow cells. What happened next was surprising: the bone marrow rebuilt the immune system but this time as a chimera?a hybrid of both the donated organ's cells and the body's own. The donated organ could then be accepted instead of rejected...
...fact that the chimeric state is not permanent, with the immune system eventually returning to its original state. Yet the patients have nonetheless continued to tolerate their donated kidneys for almost five years. Why? Sachs believes that once the immune system is trained to accept the donated organ, sentry cells protect the organ from being recognized as foreign. The transplanted kidney exists in an immune bubble, guarded from the T cells that could still destroy...
...that's the case, say transplant surgeons, it might even be possible in coming years to look outside our species for much needed organs. Once the human immune system can be trained to safely accept foreign tissue, then these so-called xenotransplants, from pigs or primates, could provide a welcome solution to the organ shortages that still put 98,000 patients in the U.S. each year on waiting lists...