IL-10 Gene Therapy helps repair damaged lungs found unfit for transplant

Promising research brings hope for the almost two thousand lung transplant candidates who currently make up The United Network for Organ Sharing's (UNOS) wait list.  A new technique that uses gene therapy to help repair damaged lungs previously found unfit for transplant shows promise for addressing the critical shortage of healthy donor organs.  Recent research on IL-10 Gene Therapy will be presented in today's symposium Getting to Yes – Increasing Lung Donors during the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation's (ISHLT) 30th Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions in Chicago.

More than 80 percent of potential donor lungs cannot be used for transplantation because the organs are damaged either before or during the transplant process.  The IL-10 Gene Therapy could potentially increase the viability of those donor lungs.

Interleukin10 (IL-10) is an anti-inflammatory cytokine.  This protein down-regulates, or decreases, the inflammatory potential of injured cells. It also has the capacity to suppress the recipient's immune system that rejects the transplanted organ.  The IL-10 gene is found normally in animal and human cells and plays a role in inhibiting the immune response to infection and the rejection response to foreign materials such as transplanted organs.

"This type of therapy could ultimately have a great impact on lung transplantation around the world," said Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, MD, University of Toronto, Canada, who will present at today's ISHLT symposium.  

Dr. Keshavjee and his team of researchers have focused on IL-10 because the protein protects against inflammatory injury as well as immune therapy.  This new approach has successfully reduced inflammation and improved function in pig lungs that were treated outside the body and transplanted into recipient pigs.  The same approach has brought about a similar improvement in human donor lungs deemed unsuitable for transplantation.  

"Although more work is needed before lungs treated with IL-10 therapy can be transplanted into human recipients," continued Dr. Keshavjee.  "The data suggest that this gene repair strategy could increase the number of usable donor organs."

This genetic technique could also be used to deliver other gene products to the lungs and might eventually be used to repair damaged lungs in a living patient.