Aditi with her mother and father
Eight-year-old Aditi Shankar has become the first child in the UK to receive a special type of kidney transplant that does not require her to take long-term drugs to stop organ rejection.
Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital say the breakthrough was made possible by reprogramming her immune system before giving her the new kidney.
To do that, they used bone-marrow stem cells from the donor – Aditi’s mother. It means Aditi’s body accepts the new organ as her own.
Within weeks of the transplant, Aditi was taken off immunosuppression, removing the risk of long-term side-effects from these powerful drugs, which usually have to be taken daily to prevent organ rejection.
Aditi has an extremely rare inherited condition, Schimke’s immuno-osseous dysplasia (SIOD), which weakened her immune system and meant her kidneys were failing.
In the first stage of her treatment, a bone-marrow transplant using stem cells from her mother, Divya, rebuilt Aditi’s immune system. Six months later, she had a successful kidney transplant – again donated by her mother – and her immune system accepted the organ.
She is now back at school, with both her immune system and transplanted kidney working normally.
More information on the BBC website here.
Last Reviewed on 22 September 2023