Renal patients’ hope may ‘stem’ from here

Indian Express ^ | 03.03.07

[Coleus]

Ahmedabad, March 3: THE illusive grafting of stem cells for kidney transplantation to ensure complete withdrawal of drugs for patients who have undergone this critical transplantation has finally been reached by a team led by Dr HL Trivedi at the Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Centre (IKDRC). The team infused new kind of stem cells called “Mesenchymal Stem Cells” on one Hetal Mewada who underwent transplantation at the institute on February 9 last. “These cells are infused to create tolerance in the recipient’s body for the donor’s organ,” said Dr Trivedi, Director of IKDRC.

Transplanters across the globe have been since long been trying to infuse stem cells in the recipient’s liver to ensure that the recipient’s system does not reject the organ from donor’s body and sustains itself without external medication. “Other than us, at least three other global experts including Dr T E Starzl from Pittsburgh, Dr Solomon Strober from Stanford and Mahammad Seig from Harvard have been in the race for a long time,” Trivedi said on Saturday.

“Usually, after transplanting a kidney, one comes across three major problems,” Trivedi pointed out adding that while in some cases there is a total rejection of the organ, in other cases chronic rejection takes place, which needs to be addressed with medicine from time to time. There is also the case of complications due to drugs, he added. “It was observed by Peter Medawar, one of the all time great transplanter, that in the case of a neo natal mouse, once stem cells of an adult mouse were infused, which got successfully grafted in the system, later skin from the same donor mouse too was transplanted on it, which the recipient accepted without trouble,” Trivedi pointed out, adding that this experiment led to the believe that infusing stem cells from the donor body would also help successful kidney transplantation as well.

People have been trying to develop various kinds of stem cells which would be accepted by the recipient without much resistance since long. “In case of cadaver transplantation (transplantation from a dead body), we have about two hours of time within which we transplant the organ,” Trivedi said adding that they had also collected fat cells from the cadaver from which Mewada got the organ and cultured them outside in the laboratory to develop this new kind of stem cells.

“It took us ten days to develop the cells in our laboratory before we could use them,” Trivedi said adding that in case of cadaver transplantation, first the organ is transplanted and the cells are taken out to laboratory to culture. “Only after the stem cells are ready do we infuse them into the recipient’s body,” Trivedi added. “While the newly developed Mesenchymal cells are used for the first time in the case of Mewada, she is showing good kidney functions,” Trivedi said adding that the medication for her is being gradually lowered. “In a short time, we hope to minimise the medication totally if not completely stop it altogether,” Trivedi added.

He further pointed out that though, IKDRC has been using stem cells on various patients for quite some time, the results have not been consistent so far. “Till today we have used stem cells on 983 patients,” Trivedi said. “However, with this new development, we hope to yield consistent near perfect transplantation hence forth,” he added.