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| Alec Patterson, MD, surgical director of lung transplant; Brandon Beal, 1,000th lung transplant patient; Bert Trulock, MD, medical director of lung transplant |
Your gift can enable Barnes-Jewish Hospital—
our region’s only comprehensive transplant center—to remain a leader in transplant care and innovation. Our talent and technology allows us to accept the sickest, highest risk patients. Through our clinical research, more patients are recieving transplants, with higher survival rates and lower rates of organ rejection.
If you choose to
fund cross-disciplinary research and technology at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, your gift will lead to
- New organ transplant techniques
- Decreased rejection
- Improved organ graft rates and patient survival rates
- More options for organ donation
- Our continued leadership in raising and changing national standards for transplant care and outcomes.
Recent Transplant Breakthroughs and Novel Research Supported in Part by Gifts to the Foundation:
Kidney Transplant
In the first head-to-head comparison of the two drugs most commonly given to prevent acute kidney rejection after transplant, an international study led by Washington University School of Medicine researchers shows that one of the drugs has superior outcomes.
Daniel C. Brennan, MD, professor of medicine and director of transplant nephrology, believes that the drug, made from a rabbit antibody, could potentially save millions in health-care costs by preventing the all-out immune attacks that can eventually lead to rejection.
“We expect that this drug will be more effective over time in preventing graft loss and reducing patient deaths,” says Brennan. “While further study is warranted, we suspect that the drug will be important not only for patients at high risk for rejection, but for all kidney transplant patients.”
Limb Transplant
“The holy grail of transplantation research is to find a way to produce permanent tolerance without the need for any anti-rejection medication,” says
Thomas Tung, MD.
Tung is working to discover how to attach donor limbs without the risk of tissue rejection or the complications of anti-rejection medication, which suppresses the entire immune system and makes transplant patients more vulnerable to infection or cancer. In his most recently published research, Tung demonstrated the effectiveness of using an antibody to block the immune’s system’s response only to the donor tissue, without preventing its ability to react to infection or cancer.
“Researchers have found that when you combine several antibodies to block several pathways at once, it may increase the effectiveness of the therapy,” says Tung. “That’s a big step toward tolerance of transplanted tissue.”