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2020 Koch Institute Image Awards Stealth Mode

Using a cancer cell trick to avoid transplant rejection

13 May 2020

Stealth Mode

Organ transplants save many thousands of lives every year, but the procedure is still risky. Even with careful donor matching there's still a chance that the recipient’s own immune cells will recognise the new organ as foreign and try to destroy it, resulting in transplant rejection. To prevent this from happening, transplant recipients need to keep taking immune-suppressing drugs that keep their immune responses in check. But these treatments can have long-term side effects and leave people vulnerable to infections and other illnesses. In search of an alternative, researchers are stealing a trick from cancer cells, which manage to hide from the immune system by producing special molecules that act as a kind of ‘invisibility cloak’. Transplanted cells (purple) that have been genetically reprogrammed to carry the same molecules become invisible to immune cells (green), paving the way for new techniques that could reduce transplant rejection in the future.

Written by Kat Arney

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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