Suicide Genes Promise New Hope for Life-Saving Transplants

For the first time doctors have given kids' life-saving transplants of immune cells, engineered to carry suicide genes in case things go wrong.3 kids at Great Ormond Street received the transplants that may have been considered too risky without what doctors called a genetic "insurance policy". The kids needed bone marrow transplants and the doctors had not been able to find a perfect match and a normal transplant had risked life-threatening complications, with donor cells turning against the kids' body, Sky News reported. So doctors tweaked cells from donors to carry a suicide gene and a unique 'flag' on their outer surface. At the first sign of complication the doctors would have injected a drug that homed in on the flag, which would have triggered the suicide gene. The cells would then have been destroyed before causing further damage. Dr Waseem Qasim, a paediatric immunologist who led the study, said that they were reluctant to use certain donors as the risks of complications after a mismatch transplant are much higher The technique has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.Source-ANI