• Question: Why don't blood transplants get rejected by the body?

    Asked by ginganinja2211 to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 19 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan

      Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      Hi ginganinja2211,
      You may have heard that when people discuss bone marrow transplants they usually talk about looking for a “match” for the patient, and this is usually a relative, for example a brother or sister. This means that the bone marrow taken from this person should be quite similar to the bone marrow from the patient so hopefully the patients immune system will not realise it’s different and not attack it. Generally this has worked quite well for many years now : )

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      As Aoife says it’s to do with matching the patient and the donor. Every cell on our body has a special protein tag on it that shows it belongs to you, kind of like a bar code. Immune cells in our body read this bar code and if they recognise it they leave the cell alone, however if they don’t recognise it they attack the cell because they think it is trying to invade the body. If we can find donors who have similar bar codes to the patient then we can trick the immune system into thinking these cells belong to the patient, this is why the transplants don’t get rejected. However, if the donors don’t match closely enough then there are problems with immune rejection.

      I hope that answers your question, let me know if there is anything else you want to know!

Comments