Word: transplanters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When the transplant experts tackled the rejection problem, they quickly agreed that all early drugs designed to suppress the body's immune reaction to foreign protein were bad. Since they blocked off the production of disease-fighting antibodies indiscriminately, said London's Sir Peter Medawar, they left the transplant patient easy prey to infectious crises caused by the commonest microbes that healthy people carry around all the time...
Most candidates for heart transplants have been ill so long that they have suffered deterioration of many other vital organs, notably the lungs. So, Stanford University's Dr. Norman E. Shumway Jr. suggested, it would be a good thing to transplant at least one lung, or a large part of it, along with a heart. Nine transplants of lungs, or lobes of lungs, have failed. The tenth, performed a fortnight ago by Dr. Arthur Beall of Dr. Michael DeBakey's team in Houston, was doing well last week...
...most noted transplant teams have now turned to antilymphocyte serum or globulin (TIME July 26). It is made by injecting human white blood cells into animals (usually horses), which make antibody against them. When this antibody, extracted from the animal's serum, is injected into a transplant patient, it interferes with the ability of his own white cells to make antibody against his graft...
...trouble with ALG, as it is abbreviated, is that transplant patients apparently can never be weaned of it, and some cannot tolerate it for more than a few weeks or months. They develop severe allergic reactions to it. Besides, said Medawar, "ALG is conceptually an archaic substance. Injecting horse-serum derivatives into human beings violates our sense of the fitness of things." It was Medawar's work in the early 1950s, which explained why some skin grafts in mice are rejected and others not, that laid the foundation for all today's transplant surgery. And now the transplant...
Different Shapes. The target of all medications that suppress organ rejections is what the experts call "the transplant antigens," protein molecules that are too small to be seen even with the electron microscope. Apparently they sit on the outside of the body's cells, ready to trigger an antibody reaction and rejection phenomenon if the cells are transplanted, as part of a kidney or heart, into another person...