Living Drug May Save Transplanted Organs

Inside a freezer in Columbia’s cell therapy lab, nearly a billion customized cells packed in a container no bigger than a yogurt cup may be the last chance to save the kidney of Pawel Muranski’s patient.

The kidney was transplanted only a few months ago. But because the patient’s immune system is suppressed to keep it from attacking the organ, a virus in the patient has reactivated and sparked a dangerous infection.

No antiviral therapies exist to fight the virus causing the infection. And taking the patient off immunosuppressants will almost definitely lead to loss of the transplanted organ.

The only option now is an experimental cell therapy—a “living drug” developed by Muranski and his colleagues at Columbia’s Cellular Immunotherapy Laboratory—that sets loose an army of T cells inside the patient to recognize and kill the virus.

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