The future of organ transplants | Professor Sir Robert Lechler | AMSlive

Professor Sir Robert Lechler is an organ transplant researcher. In this talk, he discusses how and why organ transplants are rejected, and how research is developing a brighter future for patients.

By exploring how the immune system discriminates between threats and infections, and our own body tissue, Sir Robert highlights the remarkable phenomenon of self-tolerance. Organ transplantation has been one of the major success of medicine in the 20th century. But patients still face major problems with infections and increased cancer risk through immunosuppressive drugs, gradual rejection of transplants, and a general shortage of organ donors with waiting lists often reaching many years long. This talk explains how research is giving new insights about how to regulate the immune system by controlling a type of white blood cells called regulatory T-cells. Sir Robert talks us through his own experiments testing transplant mechanisms, and how these are now showing exciting new prospects for preventing organ transpant rejection in patients.

Professor Sir Robert Lechler PMedSci is the Vice-Principal of Health at King’s College London and President of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

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This AMSlive talk was filmed on 17 October 2018 at the annual Helix Group reception, hosted by Clive Cookson, Science Editor at the Financial Times. Find out more about the Helix Group:
https://acmedsci.ac.uk/about/support-...

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