Two more new medicines are approved by the FDA for use in transplant recipients. These drugs hold promise for providing even better control of rejection with fewer side effects. At Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Lloyd Ratner, M.D. and Louis Kavoussi, M.D., perform the world's first laparoscopic live-donor nephrectomy in which a patient's kidney is removed through a hole slightly larger than a silver dollar. The Department of the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery announces a research breakthrough that raises new hope that acute transplant rejection may be prevented and reversed without the need for chronic immunosuppressant drugs. Navy researchers report that they are now able to prevent kidney transplant rejection in primates with different histocompatibility factors through the use of a combination of a specific fusion protein and a specific monoclonal antibody.
Further trials are necessary to determine future applicability of the technique to humans.
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