Since the first transplantation until today, many important discoveries have been made, both surgically and in the monitoring through increasingly innovative immunosuppressive therapies.
Despite these numerous advances and the presence of effective immunosuppressive therapies, the rejection rate is still of 10% and may therefore further be decreased.
Chiesi Laboratory is one of the leaders in the fields of neonatology, asthma, COPD and rare diseases.
Thanks to its strong expertise in the hospital field, specialty medicine and advanced medical innovation, Chiesi laboratory wishes every day to allow its know-how to be placed at the disposal of the public.
Kidney and liver transplant is nowadays a major public health issue because of the insufficient number of available grafts. It is therefore essential to reduce the risk of rejection.
To address this issue, Chiesi Laboratory provides its medical expertise and its capacity for innovation for transplant patient care. And it is therefore with the aim of improving the quality of life of these patients that Chiesi Laboratory has decided to partner with another pharmaceutical company to share their scientific knowledge and thus offer a new therapeutic option to patients. Thus, a partnership has been developed between Veloxis Pharmaceuticals and Chiesi in order to provide the MeltDose® technology to transplant patients.
Organ transplant is possible for different types of organs: kidney, liver, heart, lungs, pancreas and bowel.
Nowadays, kidney and liver transplants are carried out from human to human, it is called allograft: the organ is taken from the body of a living or deceased person.
In France, the kidney is the most grafted organ. Of the 5,123 organ transplants carried out in France in 2013, 3,074 subjects have received a kidney transplant. (Biomedicine Agency, 2014)
Renal transplant is intended for persons with chronic renal failure and may be done from a living or deceased donor. Organ transplant is regulated in France; this activity is managed by the Biomedicine Agency.
Dialysis is the other replacement treatment for those persons with chronic renal failure. However, as dialysis is a heavy treatment which decreases the quality of life of patients with chronic renal failure, renal allograft is a technique frequently proposed to replace dialysis.
In 2013 in France, 1,241 liver transplants have been carried out, which makes the liver the most grafted organ after the kidney.
Liver transplant may be offered to patients with cholestatic chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, fulminant hepatitis or hepatocellular carcinoma.
More generally, liver transplant should be discussed in all cases of irreversible or life-threatening liver disease.
Unlike kidney transplant which has only one possible type of transplant, liver transplant may be performed in four different ways depending on the patient:
- Orthotopic transplantation: the patient liver is removed and replaced by that of the donor.
- Shared transplantation which allows grafting two patients from a single liver.
- Domino transplantation, performed in the very special case of a disease called "familial amyloid polyneuropathy"
- Heterotopic auxiliary transplantation in the case of fulminant hepatitis allows partial or total liver transplant which enables the initial liver of the patient to regenerate and therefore cure
The medical treatment due to a graft should be initiated during the organ transplantation and continued throughout life to prevent organ rejection. The treatment is personalized and consists of one or several daily intakes of immunosuppressive agents. Most of the time, a combination of several molecules is used. This treatment should be taken for life because rejection may occur at any time, even years after transplantation. Treatment and/or dose adjustments or changes may be proposed to receivers throughout their life in order to better respond to the personalization of their management.
References:
http://www.dondorganes.fr/016-les-chiffres-cles
Biomedicine Agency 2014
