Professor Anthony Warrens
speaker
19 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2014
last heard Nov 2014
Professor Anthony Warrens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But she shouldn't be surprised because we're now doing a very large number of living donations exactly like this, partner to partner.
And the outcome really is fantastic now.
That's because we've learnt to do some manipulation of the immune system that makes it possible to do transplants that frankly just wouldn't have worked 15 years ago.
Number one is blood group compatibility.
Now, that used to be an absolute barrier.
If people were incompatible, then it just wasn't possible to do a transplant between them.
But we're now able to remove the antibodies that we've got in our blood.
to prevent the damage to somebody whose kidney blood group is incompatible.
Now, the outcome of having removed these antibodies is pretty close to the same as if there was no incompatibility of blood group.
It does work for 75% to 80% of people who are blood group incompatible if we can remove the antibodies.
The second thing is what we call tissue typing.
The details don't matter, but this is a higher hurdle to clear.
But we've learnt with the right immune suppressive drugs that we've got now available, in many cases we can suppress much of the immune response.
The outcome is, again, close to, not the same, but close to comparable to people who have got well tissue type matched kidneys.
two partners are not going to be genetically related to each other, so you might predict that it's unlikely that they would have a tissue type in common, and that's largely true.
But nonetheless, with the drugs available to us, assuming people are blood group compatible, the chances, in my experience, of it being possible to do a transplant between two partners are 80% or more.
And so it's a very likely scenario to be successful.
So if you consider transplantation of all organs, a person who's agreed to donate his organs after his death will generate on average an extra 56 years of added life in other people.
That is a very major contribution.
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