Protective organ wash engineered


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UK scientists say they have developed a technique that could extend the life of a kidney transplant significantly.

At the moment, fewer than 50% of grafts are still working after a decade inside the patient.

The new approach involves washing the organ in an engineered drug solution during the transfer from the donor to the recipient.

The British Science Festival was told that the solution gives protection to the organ from the immune system.

"It can be expected to almost double the life of a graft," said Professor Steve Sacks from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Transplantation at King's College London.

The solution limits the action of a part of the immune system, known as the "complement" system, which would normally attack and attempt to destroy cells from any intruder organism, including the cells of a donor organ.

The "complement" system will also support the more general assault on the new organ by the recipient's own blood cells.

Ordinarily, the "complement" response is regulated by protein molecules that sit on the surface of kidney cells, but these molecules are lost in donor organs in the stressful process of transferring the graft into the patient.

To address the problem, the MRC team has engineered in the laboratory a substitute regulator protein it calls Mirococept. As part of this engineering, a "tail" has also been added to ensure the molecule locks down when it is "painted" on to the organ cells.

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