Word: transplanter
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...those heroes is Dr. Thomas Starzl, the doctor who, in the same year Barnard replaced Washkansky's heart, performed the first successful liver transplant in Denver. It was Starzl's team at the University of Pittsburgh's Transplantation Institute that made liver transplants routine and fine-tuned the intricate balance of immunosuppression drugs to fight the rejection of transplanted organs by the body's immune system. Now, as he approaches retirement after three decades of spectacular achievement, Starzl has reached the conclusion that he and his colleagues had, for all those years, been going about organ transplantation the wrong...
Starzl's epiphany--which he calls a "paradigm shift" in transplant thinking--in no way diminishes the work already accomplished. The surgical techniques used by him and his colleagues have added years--decades in some cases--to the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. From the 1950s through today, physicians like Starzl, Barnard, Toronto's Joel Cooper and Stanford's Norman Shumway have moved mountains' worth of kidneys, pancreases, livers, hearts and lungs from one human body to another...
...large it worked. More and more patients were surviving beyond a year, an established milestone of transplant success. But in 1992 Starzl and his colleagues discovered that there was something different about those recipients who had lived much longer--10, 20, as many as 30 years. By testing these patients, they discovered that white blood cells from the recipient's immune system had migrated into the donated organs--and vice versa. What is more, with the encouragement of the antirejection drugs, body and organ had learned to coexist in peace. If scientists could somehow find a way to facilitate that...
...bone-marrow work and solid-organ transplant work have traditionally been two separate fields of medicine. "The big misconception," says Starzl, "was not realizing that the acceptance and tolerance of solid-organ grafts are due to the same mechanisms described by Medawar. There is a seamless work of transplantation immunology. It's so damn simple, it's crushing...
...work being done is with mice, dogs and monkeys, which have been used successfully in assimilation studies by James Gozzo, dean of the Bouve College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Boston's Northeastern University, as well as by other researchers, including Judith Thomas, director of the Transplant Center at the University of Alabama. They have found that by first transplanting some donor bone marrow into the recipient animal, it is possible to trick the animal's immune system into accepting a solid-organ transplant almost as if it were native to its own body--just as Starzl suggests will...