Could a person’s own cells help to prevent a heart transplant being rejected?

Thymus derived tregs expanded in vitro as a treatment for paediatric heart transplant patients to prevent cardiac allograft vasculopathy

Professor Giovanna Lombardi at King’s College London is studying if white blood cells called regulatory T cells (Tregs), which stop our immune system attacking our healthy cells, could also prevent heart transplants being rejected. Heart transplantation is a life-saving operation. But the long-term success of a transplant is often limited by inflammation, which leads to the blood vessels supplying oxygen to the heart becoming very narrow – this is called cardiac allograft vasculopathy, or CAV. CAV causes heart transplant failure and death. To prevent it, people need large doses of drugs to suppress their immune system, which have unwanted side effects. Professor Lombardi believes Tregs could prevent CAV and transplant rejection. Her team has already grown Tregs in the lab and given them to kidney and liver transplant patients to help prevent transplant rejection, but they have not studied whether these cells can help after heart transplant. In this project, Professor Lombardi will grow Treg cells from tissue taken from children undergoing heart surgery. She will work out the best method to grow lots of these cells in the lab, select the most efficient ones and find out if they can suppress the immune reaction that causes CAV and transplant rejection. This research will pave the way for a clinical trial to reveal if treating child patients with Tregs could help to give heart transplants the best chance of success, without immunosuppressive drugs.