Robert Whitfield MD explains how the immune system rejects foreign organs and why transplant patients need immunosuppressive drugs. He references Dr. Joseph Murray's Nobel Prize-winning work on kidney transplants and how understanding this rejection process changed transplant medicine.
Do we ever accept the foreign object, or we always are body fighting to get it out.
So the last surgeon to win a Nobel Prize was Dr. Joseph Murray. He is the person who showed that you can transplant a kidney from one Siamese twin to another. So he executed all the technical steps and shows it was possible. So the next step would be the introduction of immune suppression, because obviously, not everybody has a Siamese twin who needs a kidney transplant. So if you gave me your kidney, or I gave you my kidney, they'd have to give you drugs to block the immune response. So what I find is people are getting put on little bits of drug to block their immune response. In this case, their immune system is super ramped up. Now. Nobody knows why, and they're not willing to or versed well enough in immunosuppressive, you know, therapy like you would for a transplant patient like.
