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[MarchIoda]

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Connie Culp recently received the first facial transplant in the US at the Cleveland Clinic. She has suffered only one mild rejection episode that was controlled with a single dose of steroid medicines. She must take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of her life.

I wonder what that steroid was and what immune-suppressing drugs she's on. Anyone know how to get this information?

 

[Farmercyst]

Connie Culp recently received the first facial transplant in the US at the Cleveland Clinic. She has suffered only one mild rejection episode that was controlled with a single dose of steroid medicines. She must take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of her life.

I wonder what that steroid was and what immune-suppressing drugs she's on. Anyone know how to get this information?

Probably look up "transplant" in a decent pharmacy textbook. My guess is standard cocktail for any other type of transplant.
Most of the ones I see come through are on Prograf, Cellcept, prednisone.
There are others, but that's what I see most frequently.

 

[MarchIoda]

That sounds about right, but the reason I ask about this specific patient is because I was listening to one of the surgeons on NPR this afternoon and she said that the micro-surgery has been in place for a while, and the biggest resistance to performing this type of transplant was balancing immunosupression, rejection, and infection being that facial skin is so prone to rejection. The group plans to monitor Connie before attempting any other transplants, again, implying that the immunosuppression is the current study of interest. I am curious to if you guys know more about her pharmacotherapy...

 

[Farmercyst]

From class, the rejection prone (those on 2nd liver transplant due to rejection, etc) are generally given a one of 3 primary biologicals to prevent another rejection. OKT3 is the only one I can recall at the moment, but if skin tissue is highly prone to rejection they may have done something like that.

 

[WVUPharm2007]

...these trains are carrying jobs out of Cleveland...

Oh...and that face thing is cool, too.