By Julie Bierach, KWMU
St. Louis, MO. – Researchers at Washington University have performed the first lung transplant in mice.
They hope the mouse model of lung transplantation will lead to the development of new drugs that will help prevent transplant rejection in people.
Dr. Daniel Kreisel is assistant professor of surgery at Washington University's School of Medicine, and lead investigator of the research.
He says they hope to understand why the 5 year survival rate of lung transplant patients is significantly lower than that of liver, kidney and heart transplant patients.
"Because we have a lung transplant model that is very analogous to the human, we can study those influences such as infections or gastric acid reflux or long preservations times, and look at, in an in-depth way, between those factors and the immune system," Kreisel said.
The research is published in the June issue of the American Journal of Transplantation.