Presenter : Good evening folks! Welcome to yet another episode of “Imm is Simmple” where we focus to discuss about the breaking developments and explore basic concepts about health related terms you hear every day. Today, we will be looking at Transplantation which in its essence means the moving of an organ or a tissue from one location to another. This could be within a person, between two individuals of the same species or in some cases, between different species. We hope to briefly run through some of the underlying concepts behind this transplantation process which includes the types of donors, how they are matched, what diseases or conditions are treated using transplantation and finally, wrap up with a look at the ethical perspective. …show more content…
You can call me Chris. Thanks for having me on the show.
Presenter : It’s my pleasure Chris. Would you like to start off by giving a brief introduction to this idea of transplantation and some background on it?
Expert : Sure Simon. In transplantation we look at how we can successfully introduce either an organ or a tissue onto a foreign site, be it a tissue or an organ. Essentially, it’s a process of cut and paste. The main problem we face is that, this site of pasting is not always welcome to foreign objects being pasted on it. Be it a human target site either internally or externally, there are several mechanisms in place which react when something which should not be there appears. This is of course an important regulatory step in the human immune system, since we cannot have random structures colonising places it should not be in. A successful transplantation is one in which the recipient body does not react and reject the transplant. This is done either by suppressing the immune system using drugs or other methods which involve making the site of transplantation believe that the transplant is in fact in the correct place it should be in. We also use serotyping, which is the pre-matching of fluids between the host and the recipient to see if they match and do not cause an unfavourable