Pathbreaking transplant at CMC
V NarayanaMurthi
First Published : 18 Jun 2009 03:12:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 18 Jun 2009 08:12:47 AM IST
VELLORE: Kidney patients in India no longer have to lose heart if their blood groups do not match with those of the donor’s, for the Christian Medical College Hospital (CMCH) here successfully performed one such surgery recently.
A 21-year-old college student of Vellore with ‘O’ positive blood group received kidney from his mother, who is ‘A’ positive, to become the first person to have successfully undergone the first ever blood group incompatible kidney transplantation, claimed the hospital. Because his father, who runs a teashop, was a diabetic the mother was the only possible donor. With both kidneys failed the only other option he had was to survive on dialysis for the rest of his life.
Dr George T John, Head of Department of Nephrology, said till recently blood group compatibility was a basic requirement for successful transplantation and the new method introduced by the CMCH has crossed this barrier.
This has been made possible thanks to the advancement in technology and more potent immunosuppressive drugs, said his senior colleague Dr Chakko K Jacob. The new method avoided the removal of spleen, a usual practice in many of the advanced countries, as a standard procedure. Spleen is the organ which monitors the immune response system and activates antibodies to reject the transplanted organs. And in order to retain spleen, the CMCH team used a technique of plasmapheresis (plasma exchange), which removes part of the plasma in the blood of the recipient and substitutes the same from the blood bank
to ensure that it has no antibodies that can reject the transplanted kidney.
Dr Dolly Daniel, Head, Department of Transfusion Medicine, said that the crucial factor was to measure the antibodies that were responsible for the organ rejection. It took nearly one year for the CMCH to fine-tune the method to standardise the protocol, she added. Once done, the focus shifted to developing adaptive immunity on the part of the transplanted organ.
“The surgical procedures have also been simplified and it now takes less than three hours for a transplantation which has been made possible because of the coordination of specialists attached to different departments,” said Dr Nitin Kekre, Head, Department of Urology. The CMCH initiative has opened up the floodgates of hope for thousands of kidney patients as now they can opt for donors not necessarily belonging to their blood group. While this involves an additional expenditure of Rs 5 lakhs, it has been borne by the hospital for the first patient in the maiden venture.
