A team, led by Professor Fred Fandrich from the University of Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel, Germany, developed a procedure to remove infection-fighting white cells from the blood of a kidney transplant recipient and subject them to a highly complex procedure in which cells are taken from a living or deceased donor.
The new cells gain the ability to kill off immune system cells, which trigger the rejection process. When the new cells are administered to the patient, they boost the action of another immune cell, which guards against rejection.
In the first stage, 10 patients were gradually weaned off a conventional drug cocktail, and six given a low drug dose. In the second stage of the trial, five patients who received kidneys from live donors were given an infusion of these cells. One patient went eight months without any immunosuppressant drugs, and three patients were successfully weaned to the single low-dose therapy.
The complex procedure has been tested on kidney transplant patients. The results on 17 patients are promising, according to a series of papers in the August issue of Transplant International.
