8-year old girl becomes first child in UK to receive kidney transplant without life-long drugs

An Eight-year-old girl, Aditi Shankar has become the first child in the UK to receive a special type of kidney transplant that does not require her to take long-term drugs to stop rejection of the organ.

The drugs – Immunosuppressants, also known as anti-rejection drugs, are required after a transplant to help prevent the immune system from attacking or rejecting the donor organ.

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital say the breakthrough was made possible by reprogramming her immune system before giving her the new kidney.

To do that, they used bone-marrow stem cells from Aditi’s mother.

It means Aditi’s body accepts the new organ as her own.

Within weeks of the transplant, Aditi was taken off immunosuppression, removing the risk of long-term side-effects from these powerful drugs, which usually have to be taken daily to prevent organ rejection.

She is now back at school, with both her immune system and transplanted kidney working normally.

Aditi has an extremely rare inherited condition, Schimke’s immuno-osseous dysplasia (SIOD), which weakened her immune system and meant her kidneys were failing.

Specialists at Great Ormond Street Hospital spoke with international colleagues about the special transplant approach, which has been used in other children with SIOD.

The drugs usually need to be taken daily for life but Shankar stopped taking them a month after her surgery.

Shankar has an extremely rare inherited condition, Schimke’s immuno-osseous dysplasia (SIOD), which weakened her immune system and meant her kidneys were failing.

According to BBC, the surgery, carried out by doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), was made possible by reprogramming her immune system before giving her the new kidney..

She is now back at school, with both her immune system and transplanted kidney working normally.

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First, a bone-marrow transplant using stem cells from her mother, rebuilt Shankar’s immune system.

Six months later, she had a kidney transplant, also donated by her mother, and her immune system accepted the organ.

Children’s kidney specialist at GOSH, said Shankar’s treatment appears to have been a success.

“She is the first patient in the UK who has had a kidney transplant to not require immunosuppressive medication after the surgery,” he said.

“A month after the transplant, we were able to take her off all of her immunosuppression, which means she doesn’t get the side-effects of the drugs.

“It really is great to see that she is an active eight-year-old girl, back to school, able to have an excellent quality of life.”