Researchers have discovered a technique to decrease organ rejection after a transplant by coating blood arteries on the organ to be transplanted with a specific polymer. When tested by partners at SFU and Northwestern University, the polymer created by UBC medical professor Dr. Jayachandran Kizhakkedathu and his team at the Centre for Blood Research and Life Sciences Institute significantly reduced transplant rejection in mice.
There are many benefits to this technique
The discovery might eliminate the need for medicines that prevent transplant patients’ immune systems from fighting a new organ as a foreign item, which can have significant adverse effects. Dr. Kizhakkedathu’s team devised a chemical technique for putting a polymer that mimicked these sugars to blood arteries. Dr. Stephen Withers, a chemistry professor at UBC, and the study’s co-lead authors, PhD candidate Daniel Luo and recent chemistry PhD Dr. Erika Siren, collaborated with him.
Dr. Kizhakkedathu tells SciTechDaily that our organs are protected by a coating of particular types of sugars that inhibit the immune system’s response, but these sugars are destroyed throughout the process of obtaining organs for transplantation and are no longer able to send their message. Dr. Siren continues to build on this with her ideas on cell-surface engineering inspired by her trip to the BC Transplant facility, mentioning that she remembers “seeing an organ sitting in a solution and thinking, ‘Here’s a perfect window to engineer something right’ … There aren’t a lot of situations where you’ve got this beautiful four-hour window where the organ is outside the body, and you can directly engineer it for therapeutic benefit.”
In the Nature Magazine publishing for these findings, Dr. Jonathan Choy and Winnie Enns of Simon Fraser University demonstrated that a mouse artery treated with this technique and later transplanted showed strong, long-term resistance to inflammation and rejection. A kidney transplant between mice had similar outcomes for Dr. Caigan Du of UBC and Dr. Jenny Zhang of Northwestern University. Dr. Choy, a molecular biology and biochem professor at SFU, reports to Science Daily “We were amazed by the skill of this unique technology to forestall rejection in our be taught … To be true, the stage of protection used to be unexpected.”
It will be a while before we see the technique used regularly
As of yet, the design has only been applied to blood arteries and kidneys in mice. Human clinical studies might take a long time. The researchers are also confident that it will function as well on lungs, hearts, and other organs, which may provide a wealth of information for potential organ recipients. In the year of 2019, more than 3,000 Canadians underwent organ transplantation with the aim of averting end-stage organ failure.