Scientists Convert Donor Lungs to Universal Blood Type in a Medical First

The need to find close matches complicates the process of finding a lung transplant. The patient and donor blood type is one of the characteristics that needs to be matched.

There is a bigger pool of universal donor lungs and less time on the waiting list for those in need because of new research that shows the blood type of some donated lungs could be altered before transplant.

The process works by removing the red blood cells from the body and then converting them to universal type O.

There are 100,000 patients on the US organ transplant waiting list. The process to find compatible organs is not easy.

Patients with failing organs often wait years for a life-saving transplant, and some will die if they don't receive an optimal matched organ. Less than one-third of patients on the lung transplant waiting list received an organ in the United States.

Not only are waiting times longer, but lungs going to waste because of the difficulty of finding matches.

The scientists treated eight blood type A lungs with the combination and reported that 97 percent of the blood type A antigens were removed within four hours. The conversion was done without toxicity.

Three of the newly neutral lungs were placed in the body to be used for a transplant. The converted lungs were accepted rather than rejected, at least in the crucial, early stages, because of the minimal antibody damage.

The procedure could increase the number of blood group O donor lungs from 55 percent to more than 80 percent in the future, according to the team.

Part of the experiment setup. The University Health Network.

The treatment of donor lungs minimized antibody binding, complement deposition, and antibody-mediated injury as compared with control lungs.

A rapid immune response and the rejection of the organ by the body can be caused by lungs that are the wrong blood type.

Patients with blood type O have a higher risk of dying while waiting for a suitable donor. The procedure stops the auto-immune response from happening.

The early signs are promising, but more research is needed before this process can be used with actual people. The researchers want to test the lung blood type conversion process on mice.

The researchers plan to use similar transgenic mice to study the effects of organ donor treatment.

The research has been published.