October 28, 2024, Immune Tolerance
To prevent rejection, kidney transplant patients take multiple immunosuppressants daily. However, these immunosuppressants are not only costly but also generally suppress the body’s immunity, leading to a range of serious complications, including infections, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, malignancies, and drug-induced toxicity, among others.
Therefore, successfully inducing immune tolerance in organ transplantation and enabling organ transplant patients to discontinue immunosuppressants is a shared aspiration of both doctors and patients.
What Is Immune Tolerance?
Immune tolerance in organ transplantation refers to a state where the recipient’s immune system does not attack the transplanted organ in the absence of immunosuppressants, while maintaining a normal immune response to other foreign antigens. In simple terms, if you achieve immune tolerance, your transplanted kidney will not be rejected. You will no longer need to take anti-rejection medications, thus avoiding the significant harm they can cause.
Can Immune Tolerance Be Permanent?
If the body undergoes a significant change in immune status (such as a severe infection), it can disrupt the immune tolerance state, triggering rejection.
Previously, it was believed that once the immune tolerance state was disrupted and rejection occurred, returning to immune tolerance would be extremely challenging.
However, a recent study published in Nature Communications, a prestigious international academic journal, by a team from the University of Chicago in the U.S., has found that immune tolerance disrupted by infection can be restored.
The researchers developed a heart transplant model in mice and induced immune tolerance. After maintaining stable immune tolerance for a month, they disrupted it with Listeria monocytogenes infection, triggering rejection of the transplanted heart. However, a week later, they transplanted hearts from the same donor into the same mice and observed no rejection, indicating that immune tolerance had been restored.
Further studies by the researchers revealed that regulatory T cells played a critical role in the self-recovery process of the immune tolerance state.
Research Hotspots in Transplantation
Inducing and maintaining immune tolerance long-term in organ transplantation is the most critical research focus in the global field of organ transplantation. The Kidney Transplantation Department at Zhongshan Hospital, affiliated with Fudan University, is China’s leading research center for immune tolerance in kidney transplantation, having amassed extensive research findings and clinical experience. It is believed that these valuable findings and experiences will bring hope to more patients with uremia and those undergoing kidney transplantation.
Written by | Jia Yichen, Edited by | Lin Miao, Photography | Grace T
