Drug-Free Organ Transplants From Unrelated Donors

It remains unclear whether the secret to Ildstad?s recipe is the facilitating cells or the timing of a certain chemotherapy drug, called cyclophosphamide, that is used to prevent graft rejection and GvHD. ?The facilitating cell adds an extra level of complexity that might not be necessary,? Tisdale says. The question is difficult to answer ? all of the study subjects received the facilitating cells.

Moreover, much about the cells themselves and the method used to isolate them remain shrouded in a veil of secrecy ? Ildstad is seeking a way to commercialize the approach through a company she founded called Regenerex, based in Louisville. ?It?s difficult to assess something that doesn?t provide the key methodology,? says Megan Sykes, director of the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology at Columbia University in New York. ?Nobody is quite sure what these cells are.?

So the good news is that this will likely be funded right through the trials phase. The bad news is that it'll come out the other end wrapped in IP restrictions and not widely available to the public as a standard procedure.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/cxtY0T0NQOo/drug-free-organ-transplants-from-unrelated-donors

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