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, 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.
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.
Now, the research begins to determine how and why this happened.
She looks like a fatter version of Winnie Cooper.
Amazing and if this pans out, it could mean a whole new life for a lot of people.
I believe this woman is now technically a “chimera” meaning her body contains a high population of cells with foreign DNA.
There’s an article in this months Scientifc American about “microchimerism”. As it turns out, many if not all of us contain a small but viable population of cells from our mothers.
Hallelujah, the age of miracles is not over!!! Eideard, this article needs one of those “miracle banners”…
(btw… good for the girl… she’s quite cute)
Trouble Ahead!!!
This is a great event, no question. No question as well that science will figure out how it happened and be able to replicate it.
No question that organ donations will be safer and recipients will live much longer.
QUESTION! How long till we transplant pig livers and monkey hearts without fear of rejection because we are changing OUR immune system to become THEIR immune system? True human chimeras?
Enough talk get on with the vivisection and lets sort this thing out…
Saw recently they have been using bone marrow transplants of the donors so the recipients don’t need anti rejection drugs.
Wonder if those people will have some kind of change too.
Wouldn’t the new immune system reject the rest of the body, though?
ya, cute girl….
OT: why has the Anonymous vs. CoS post been taken down??
I read in New Scientist a few years ago, this has happened before. Where treatment for a rare leukaemia required radiation treatment to kill off all living bone marrow – a donor’s bone marrow, from a different group, changed the blood type. Not for the faint hearted. The donor’s tissue needed treatment to render the immune targeted proteins inactive, to stop rejection. Or so I vaguely recall.
@DVDChris – your comment about her weight is out of place, as if I’m not mistaken it is frequently one of the side effects of some of this medication for anti-rejection.
They’ve known for a while that babies under six months can receive an organ from an unmatched donor and not require any anti rejection drugs. Another side effect is that when they grow up they are able to accept a transfusion of blood from the donor’s blood group without ill effect. They don’t change blood group though.
Happens often with bone marrow/blood stem cell transplants. Unusual with solid organ transplants but can happen as it did here.
Move on …..
I’ve got an old Wurlitzer I’m willing to donate.
Sorry. I didn’t say she didn’t look good…she does resemble the younger Danica McKellar quite a bit, at least in this photo.