Australian girl changes blood group, immune system
Pastor Dale Morgan
Australian girl changes blood group, immune system*
Reuters
Thursday, January 24, 2008; 8:05 PM
CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian teenage girl has become the world's
first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the
immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a
"one-in-six-billion miracle."
Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years
old and her own liver failed.
"It's like my second chance at life," Brennan told local media,
recounting how her body achieved what doctors said was the holy grail of
transplant surgery. "It's kind of hard to believe."
Brennan's body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when
she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ by her
body's immune system.
Her new liver's blood stem cells then invaded her body's bone marrow to
take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs
anti-rejection drugs.
Doctors from Sydney's Westmead Childrens' Hospital said they had no
explanation for Brennan's recovery, detailed in the latest edition of
The New England Journal of Medicine.
"There was no precedent for this having happened at any other time, so
we were sort of flying by the seat of our pants," Michael Stormon, a
pediatric hepatologist, told local radio.
Stuart Dorney, the hospital's former transplant unit head, said
Brennan's treatment could lead to breakthroughs in organ transplant
treatment, because normally the immune system of recipients attacked the
transplanted tissue.
"We now need to go back over everything that happened to Demi-Lee and
see why, and if it can be replicated," said Dorney.
"We think because we used a young person's liver and Demi-Lee had low
white blood cells, that could have been a reason," he told the Daily
Telegraph newspaper.
Rejection is normally treated with a combination of drugs, although
chronic rejection is irreversible.
Only seven-in-10 transplant operations in Australia are successful after
a five-year period due to rejection complications.
(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Alex Richardson)