PHILADELPHIA, April 5 (UPI) -- Canadian researchers found infants under the age of 1 needing a heart transplant can accept organs from different blood types.
"The baby's body educates itself to accept the organ and become tolerant of the blood type," says study co-author Dr. Lori West, a pediatric cardiologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
The body's tolerance of a donor organ has always been one of the greatest challenges of transplant medicine and a transplant from a mismatched donor results in the recipient rejecting the organ.
"The medical community has been trained that you just don't cross that blood group barrier," West said. "We have induced Type B to Type O, AB to O, A to B, etc., all with excellent results."
The findings are published in Nature Medicine and are being presented at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation annual meeting in Philadelphia.
