Teen Takes On Donor's Immune System

Leibel writes "The Australian ABC News is reporting that a 15-year-old Australian liver transplant patient has defied modern medicine by taking on her donor's immune system. Demi-Lee Brennan had a liver transplant. Nine months later, doctors at Sydney's Westmead Children's Hospital were amazed to find the teenager's blood group had changed to the donor's blood type. They were even more surprised when they found the girl's immune system had almost totally been replaced by that of the donor, meaning she no longer had to take anti-rejection drugs. 'Dr. Michael Stormon says his team is now trying to identify how the phenomenon happened and whether it can be replicated. "That's probably easier said than done... I think it's a long shot," he said. "I think it's a unique system of events whereby this happened. "We postulate there's a number of different issues - the type of liver failure that she had, some of the drugs that we use early on to suppress the immune system and also that she suffered an infection with a virus called CMV, or cytomegalovirus, which can also suppress the immune system."'"

Comments

But what about her OEM parts?

[kindbud]

Wouldn't her new immune system see the rest of her body apart from the liver as a foreign invader, and attack it?

Re:Self-rejection?

[AgentPaper]

That was precisely my thought - where exactly does this differ from GVH? Any time you have a mismatch between HLA haplotypes on immune cells and other tissue cells, you're going to have an immune reaction, regardless of whose immune cells initiate it. It's rather unique that this occurred in the context of a solid organ transplant - you usually see it with bone marrow - but the underlying process doesn't look any different.

Of course, ABC News isn't exactly a peer-reviewed journal, so I'll reserve full analysis for such time as this patient is written up in the literature, but I'm not seeing anything outside the realms of modern medicine here.