Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: thedoc on 24/05/2011 13:29:08
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Scientists have found a way to selectively shut down the components of the immune system responsible for triggering autoimmune diseases and rejecting transplanted organs.
Read the whole story on our website by clicking here (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/news/news/2271/)
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Interesting.
I like the highly targeted approach.
When I read this, I started thinking about bone marrow transplants, which I believe eventually lead to recognition of both host and donor tissue.
And, in fact, there have been studies of transplanting bone marrow along with the transplanted organ.
I suppose what this study indicates is that rather than transplanting all the bone marrow from the donor, one may only need to select the treg cells if they could be isolated, and thus have less risk of Graft-versus-host disease.
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In the case of allogeneic bone marrow transplant, actually it's slightly complicated because there is a desire to achieve a degree of graft-versus-leukaemia activity, to help to suppress the existing disease state. Care would be needed to ensure that this activity wasn't compromised.