Transplantation: 'molecular miscegenation' blurs the boundary between self and non-self
Saturday, November 1, 2008 - 18:35
in Health & Medicine
A new discovery by London biologists may yield new ways of handling the problem of transplant rejection. In a research article published in the November 2008 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), the scientists confirm the two-way transfer of a molecule (called "MHC") that instructs the immune system to tell "self" from "non-self." By disrupting the transfer of this molecule, newly transplanted organs should become "invisible" to the host's immune system. Such an advance would be considered a major medical breakthrough because current methods of preventing organ rejection involve weakening the host's immune system, which can lead to life-threatening infections.