Lung transplantation has become an accepted treatment modality for end stage lung disease. Traditionally, immunosuppressive maintenance therapy consists of cyclosporin, azathioprine, and prednisolone in kidney and liver transplantation as well as in lung transplantation. Despite the use of these drugs, acute rejection occurs frequently, especially in the first weeks and months after lung transp...

Immunosuppressive drugs used in the management of heart and lung transplants have a large monetary and quality of life cost due to their side effects. Total lymphoid irradiation (TLI) is one method of minimising the need for or replacing post-operative immunosuppressive drugs. A literature review was conducted on electronic databases using defined search terms. The aim was to establish the indi...

Islet cell transplantation offers a potential cure for type 1 diabetes, but it is challenged by insufficient donor tissue and side effects of current immunosuppressive drugs. Therefore, alternative sources of insulin-producing cells and isletfriendly immunosuppression are required to increase the efficiency and safety of this procedure. Beta cells can be transdifferentiated from precursors or a...

A substantial number of patients with lupus nephritis (LN) are refractory to conventional glucocorticoid (GC) treatment. Although many of these patients respond to immunosuppressive drugs such as intravenous cyclophosphamide (IVCY), azathioprine (AZA), mizoribine, tacrolimus, cyclosporine A (CSA) and mycofenolate mofetil (MMF), some remain refractory to such therapies. Recent studies of multi-t...

Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is a common disease threatening the health of humankind. It has a low survival rate and a poor prognosis. Under normal circumstances, tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) play the main role in the antitumor process, but studies in recent years have found that NSCLC is capable of releasing various immunosuppressive factors, inducing the TILs to exhibit high ex...

Posterior reversible encephalopathy is a complex but well-recognized clinical and radiological entity associated with a variety of benign and malignant conditions including hypertensive encephalopathy, eclampsia, renal failure and immunosuppressive drugs. The pathogenesis is incompletely understood, although it seems to be related to the breakthrough of auto-regulation and endothelial dysfuncti...

Organ transplant recipients frequently suffer from toxicity or from lack of efficacy of immunosuppressive drugs, which can be attributed to individual variations in drug sensitivity. This problem can be resolved by applying pharmacodynamic monitoring that focuses on measuring the biological effects of drugs. Here we discuss the new technique called phospho-specific flow cytometry to monitor the...

BACKGROUND: Management of patients with autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA) and reticulocytopenia remains challenging. CASE REPORTS: Two patients with decompensated AIHA who were receiving immunosuppressive drugs were treated with erythropoietin (EPO). Administration of EPO increased reticulocyte counts and hemoglobin concentrations in both cases. One patient completely recovered following a sh...

results it was found that the positive hepatitis b surface antigen (hbsag), the high baseline hbv dna level, the positive hepatitis b virus e antigen (hbeag), and an absent or low hepatitis b surface antibody (hbsab) titer prior to starting treatment are the most important viral risk factors. furthermore, rituximab, anthracycline, and different types of tnf-α inhibitors were identified as the h...

The immunosuppressive drugs used to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs have a narrow therapeutic index. Under treatment results in episodes of rejection leading to either damage or loss of the organ. Over immunosuppression increases the risk of infection and malignancy as well as drug specific complications including diabetes mellitus and nephrotoxicity. There is wide variation in the...