NBC News: For one infant, a novel heart transplant technique may help fight organ rejection
By Kaitlin Sullivan
Last summer, Easton Sinnamon’s parents learned that surgery wouldn’t be enough to fix the leaky valve in his infant heart.
Doctors told them that Easton would need a heart transplant, which would typically mean he would need to remain on immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of his life, so that his body’s immune system didn’t reject the transplanted organ.
But Easton also happened to have another condition that made him a distinct candidate for a novel procedure that, some experts say, could one day have major implications for organ-transplant recipients, by doing away with the need for immune-suppressing drugs.
According to Dr. William Gibson, a surgical director of cardiac transplantation at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City, Missouri, being able to transplant solid organs — including the heart and kidneys — without the recipient’s body rejecting the donated organ is the “holy grail of transplantation.”
“If this is the first step in being able to do that with a simultaneous thymus transplant, that will potentially change the game in solid organ transplant,” Gibson said.
Read the full article via NBC News
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