A new technique developed with support from Medicine by Design could improve the success rate of organ and cell transplants by reducing the need for anti-rejection drugs.
Transplant recipients currently rely on immunosuppressant drugs to keep their bodies from rejecting the transplanted cells or organs. Not only must they consume these medications for the rest of their lives, but they are also subject to increased risk of infection caused by the suppression of their immune systems.
Andras Nagy is a professor at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and a senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), part of Sinai Health. Nagy and his team have developed a strategy they call ‘immune cloaking’ that enables donor cells to escape detection by a host immune system. Working with mouse embryonic stem cells, they found that by overexpressing eight key genes related to immune function, they could prevent the immune system from recognizing the stem cells as foreign. The research is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Such a system could one day enable clinicians to implement new therapies for a variety of diseases. For example, they could implant insulin-producing cells, grown from stem cells, into a person to replace those lost or damaged by diabetes.
“Our work paves the way for an ‘off-the-shelf’ supply of cells for therapies that could be safely given to many patients,” says Nagy.
“Medicine by Design has been really important in supporting scientists in bringing the possibilities of regenerative medicine to patients. I’m grateful to Medicine by Design for funding the high-risk and high impact projects that many other funding agencies often say are just too ambitious.”
Launched in 2015 with the support of a $114-million investment from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), Medicine by Design has made large-scale, strategic investments in high-risk, high-reward research, advancing more than 190 projects. It has recruited world-class faculty and provided training programs to thousands of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and other personnel at U of T and its affiliated hospitals.