Stealth Mode

Organ transplants save many thousands of lives every year, but the procedure is still risky. Even with careful donor matching there's still a chance that the recipient’s own immune cells will recognise the new organ as foreign and try to destroy it, resulting in transplant rejection. To prevent this from happening, transplant recipients need to keep taking immune-suppressing drugs that keep their immune responses in check. But these treatments can have long-term side effects and leave people vulnerable to infections and other illnesses. In search of an alternative, researchers are stealing a trick from cancer cells, which manage to hide from the immune system by producing special molecules that act as a kind of ‘invisibility cloak’. Transplanted cells (purple) that have been genetically reprogrammed to carry the same molecules become invisible to immune cells (green), paving the way for new techniques that could reduce transplant rejection in the future.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

Website

• Cloak and Swagger: Learning From the Enemy; A winner in the 2020 Koch Institute Image Awards
• Image by Arnav Chhabra, David Mankus, Margaret Bisher, Abigail Lytton-Jean and Sangeeta Bhatia; Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies, MIT
• Image courtesy of the Koch Institute Image Awards