Transplantationstechnologien und Forschung

Belatacept, a New Paradigm in Organ Transplantation

Abstract

Wael Lateef Jabur

It has been long time before a new medicine introduced to the forefront of immunosuppressant therapies. It has come after long extended studies, enrolling hundreds of patients, from different countries, in the phase III of the widely known BENEFIT, and BENEFIT-EXT trials. It sounds like a new hope for the transplantation community, which is still striving to overcome the hurdles of the older regimens of immunosuppressant’s, with its critical side effects, in particular the nonspecificity of the immunosuppression with the consequent issues of the opportunistic infections, the lymphoproliferative and the neoplastic complications. And the other common nonspecific complications like hypertension, diabetes, and the hyperlipidemia with its subsequent mounting cardiovascular mortality and morbidity (the most common cause of mortality in transplant recipients). And most importantly,the ever challenging chronic allograft nephropathy which is partly attributed to the direct Calcineurin inhibitors (CNI) toxicity.