Laura Hale, MD, PhD, Professor of Pathology, and Joseph Turek, MD, PhD, Associate Professor and Chief of Duke Pediatric Cardiac Surgery, have received a two-year R21 grant titled “Transplantation of Cryopreserved Thymus” from the National Institute of Allergy, Immunology, and Infectious Diseases.
Hale was part of the team that showed that implanting freshly cultured thymus tissue (CTTI) into children born without a thymus can establish an immune system that is tolerant to antigens present on the donor thymus, while maintaining tolerance to recipient native tissue. Turek was part of the team that extended these findings to reprogram the immune system of immunocompetent rats to recognize a transplanted donor heart as “self” using CTTI combined with transplantation of heart from the same donor. In August 2021, Turek led the team that performed the world’s first human CTTI/heart co-transplantation was performed at Duke under an emergency authorization from the FDA.
“This has the potential to change the face of solid organ transplantation in the future,” said Turek.
Duke is the only center in the world offering CTTI surgery. However, a major hurdle to translating this approach more widely is that CTTI using freshly cultured thymus must occur between 12 to 21 days post-thymus/heart harvest. This project will test the ability of cryopreserved cultured thymus tissue to re-establish thymus function and immune tolerance. If successful, these studies will facilitate the future expansion of human thymus-heart co-transplantation to more patients who could benefit from this procedure.
Since 1995, Hale has served as Principal Investigator or co-investigator on over 40 National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DOD), and privately funded grants to study mechanisms and novel therapies for immune-mediated diseases and cancer. This new program complements her ongoing work relating to mechanisms of thymus aging, thymus reconstitution after injury, and immune system establishment or regeneration via implantation of cultured thymus tissue (thymus transplantation).