Research Group
- Prof. Jonathan S. Bromberg, Principlal Investigator
Location
- Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York, USA
Title
- Gene Therapy to Prolong Graft Survival
While organ transplantation is generally successful, there are still a number of significant problems that affect all transplant patients. Most transplanted organs are eventually rejected after a period of several years, and most patients have to take multiple immunosuppressive medications for the rest of their lives, or at least while the transplant is functioning. These medications are expensive, cause a number of significant side effects and do not ensure indefinite survival of the transplanted organ. Thus, there is a critical need to understand more completely the immune system, so that new techniques and new drugs can be developed that will ensure better organ survival, while decreasing the side effects of the treatments.
This research application will investigate in particular the effectiveness of gene transfer and gene therapy techniques in transplantation. Gene therapy has the potential to deliver immunosuppressive drugs directly to the organ, thereby avoiding drug side effects to the other organs of the patient. Gene therapy also has the potential to deliver novel drugs that have never been used before in transplantation. This research application proposes to use gene therapy to deliver a new class of drugs, called chemokine inhibitors, to organ transplants, and determine if they promote the survival of the transplant.
