Glossary / Life sciences and medicine
Antibody-mediated rejection
Rejection in which the recipient produces antibodies against a transplanted organ, and those antibodies attack the organ's blood vessels and gradually impair it.
Rejection can be driven directly by immune cells or through antibodies. In antibody-mediated rejection, antibodies bind to the lining of the organ's vessels, triggering inflammation and small clots that damage the organ over time. It is a leading obstacle to long-term survival even in human-to-human transplants[1].
In xenotransplants the same changes have been reported to advance over months rather than years. Stronger immunosuppression can hold it back, but at the price of vulnerability to infection.
Related terms
- XenotransplantationTransplanting organs or tissues from animals into humans. Today the main candidates are kidneys and hearts from genetically modified pigs.
- ImmunosuppressionUsing drugs to weaken the immune system so that it does not reject a transplanted organ.
- Carbohydrate antigenA sugar chain on the cell surface that the immune system uses as a target. In xenotransplantation the key example is α-Gal, present in pigs but absent in humans.