Defeating Immune Rejection

As noted by the Life Extension Foundation News, research into xenotransplantation continues to advance in parallel to regenerative medicine and tissue engineering work. That's not the important part of this research however - the significance is all in what was done to suppress the normal difficulties with immune rejection: "MicroIslet says it has developed a way to encapsulate cells taken from pigs in a material so that it is not recognized by the body as foreign material and then attacked by the immune system. The transplant recipients were seven rhesus monkeys whose own pancreatic islets (clusters of endocrine cells that contain the cells that produce insulin) were destroyed. ... If there's evidence that rejection is not occurring, despite no immune suppression, that's promising and potentially important for the future." Very much so - a wealth of opportunities lie in the future for any successful variant of this technology.

Link: http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=4179&Section=DISEASE

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