How the Immune System Impacts Organ Transplantation

Owing to any severe disease or injury, sometimes an organ system might fail to function normally. In that case, it can be successfully substituted by another healthy organ or tissue from a compatible donor.

Transplantation and Rejection:

Transplantation of any organ is the procedure of transferring cells or tissues and even organs. Mainly aims at the need to repair and replace a diseased and damaged organ or tissue.

Rejection happens when the transplanted organ or tissues in our body are treated as a foreign particle by our innate immune system. Usually the donor's set of HLA protein is declared foreign by the recipient's immune system. This identification however triggers a chemical response to destroy the transplanted organ or tissue.

Ways to cope organ rejection:

However, the risk of rejection of the graft, as the transplanted organ or tissue is known as, can be reduced by effective manipulation of the immune system. To achieve the long-time survival of the graft, the donor and recipient are deliberately checked for histocompatibility, before the transplantation. This minimises and also reduces the risk of rejection in many cases. Matching can be done on the basis of the ABO blood group system in humans, tissue typing, panel reactive antibody test, cross matching, serology screening or even checking the recipient's blood serum reaction against the donor's cells.

Medicinal drug use to combat rejection:

Immunosuppressive drugs - drugs that supress and reduce the strength of the immune system of the body. This dampens the entire immune response of the body which in turn prevents graft rejection. However immunosuppressive drugs are more diffused in their action that might leave the patient prone to developing further diseases.

Organ transplantation is one the most difficult operation - greatly considered as a life-saving intervention. However, it is done when all other forms of treatment or medications have failed. Elaborate research is going on to discover newer ways of organ rejection prevention.