Advances in Organ Transplant Technology: How Does it Impact Over Human Beings
To help prevent the rising problem of organ rejection, transplant recipients could receive a drug that is effectively personalized to their immune systems. This is done if and only if a new test is successful after passing its early trials.
Moreover, newer methods are being developed for scrubbing the animal tissue, which could enable human beings to benefit from organs of other species in the nearer future.
In the European Union alone, 60,000 people were standing on the waiting lists for organ transplants at the end of the year 2017. The waiting list is growing as a result of recent trends such as the rise in diabetes amongst people, which has led to the urgent need for more kidney and pancreas transplants.
One harsh problem, however, is that the patient’s body’s immune system fights the arrival of a foreign organ and tries to reject it. This is the reason why doctors give immune-suppressing drugs to patients. However, despite their constant efforts, 30% to 50% of kidneys that are transplanted are lost within 10 years of surgery because of rejection by the host body.
However, the immune systems of people vary in their responses to different immune-suppressing drugs. Moreover, there is a risk that the organ can be unnecessarily damaged while the best drug is still in the process of being found. This leads to a reduction in the length of time the organ will last. In the case of the most common causes of organ transplants of kidneys, a failed transplant means dialysis, which drains a significant amount of the patient’s finances, expectations and effort.
Prescribing antibiotics is a very different situation. If you have an infection, a doctor can send a sample of your blood or swab for analysis. Pathology labs will grow bacteria from the provided sample and test their susceptibility to different antibiotics. The process of testing is very cheap, and it often works in most cases.
However, in recent years, biomedical researchers and developers have begun to think whether a similar test could be carried out for the development of anti-rejection drugs. Culturing and obtaining of immune cells can be done very quickly. The next step is to expose this culture of immune cells to a host of immunosuppressive drugs.
Although these tests have never been done before, various hypothetical assumptions had been made on the possible outcomes of these tests in an academic setting with unwieldy apparatus.
Biohope, a medical foundation, has been working on these tests on immunosuppressant drugs for quite a long time. The researchers, however, have faced various setbacks, and the test proved to be more challenging than they had anticipated. One challenge was that it proved downright difficult to grow immune cells in the lab culture. Another challenge was to scale up the test while keeping it simple and being able to give consistent results simultaneously.
Although it is not as simple as the test of antibiotics, researchers in Biohope have made quite a few positive strides, and a version of the immunosuppressant drugs test, known as Immunobiogram is ready for further developments.
Recent Advances in Organ Transplant Technology
1. Immune cells
Mammal tissue consists of a structure called the extracellular matrix, which is made up of fibres of proteins like collagen and elastin. This matrix is present with the cells and can trigger immune reactions, unlike the matrix. Scientists want to flush the cells out by washing the tissue with a special detergent.
Once the matrix is clean, it can be repopulated with required cells like stem cells, and other substances like hormones to allow the matrix to grow into a particular tissue or organ to be transplanted into patients.
2. Supercritical carbon dioxide
Supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO₂) is a vital solvent used in food science, cleaning, and polymer synthesis industries. It has a low environmental impact on biological materials. Carbon dioxide at normal atmospheric pressure is non-toxic. It is useful in clearing out fats, or lipids. Researchers of project CriTiClean has discovered that, since cell walls are made of lipids, the scCO₂ breaks and extracts them. However, it cannot get rid of the tissue, resulting in sticky cell nuclei. After much experimentation, it has been shown that addition of limonene and enzymes finishes the job faster and gentler. Increasing researches with retinal tissue have highlighted the possibility that animal retinal tissue could be repurposed for human eyes.
This experiment summarizes that supposedly, you take pig tissues, remove the cells, and then apply the extracellular matrix.
After that, add any cell you want, construct a tissue, and have a bank of tissues available that are no longer immune reactive and can become very helpful for the living being.
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