Work

Human-to-baboon bone marrow transplantation after conditioning with nonlethal irradiation.

Year: 1994

Type: article

Abstract: The increasing shortage of human donors critically limits allogeneic transplantation as a treatment of choice for end-stage organ failure. As a result of this problem, there has been a resurgence of interest in xenotransplantation. It has been universally recognized that to make transplantation across discordant species a reality, many formidable physiological barriers have to be triumphed. On the contrary, nonhuman primates (eg, chimpanzee, baboon, etc), by sharing many physiologic and genetic characteristics with humans, offer a more reasonable alternative as donors for xenogeneic organ transplantation. These observations, however, did not translate favorably in clinical trials, for attempts at transplantation across concordant species were met with an undesirable outcome, 1–3 prompting many clinicians and researchers to look for or attempt to create a more suitable donor for future xenotransplantation. Our group is interested in modifying the donor’s immune system prior to organ transplantation, and as such an attempt was made to create humanized baboons by infusing human bone marrow cells into a sublethally irradiated donor (baboon). We report the incidence of chimerism and in vitro immune reactivity in human-to-baboon bone marrow chimeras. The use of such chimeric donors for future xenotransplantation is also discussed.

Source: PubMed