Today monoclonal antibodies are used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, transplant rejection, psoriasis, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, macular degeneration and several types of cancer.
But it is not yet known whether tissues derived from embryonic stem cells would cause transplant rejection, whereas this does not seem to be a problem with adult stem cells.
Could patients have themselves cloned in order to harvest cells from a genetically-identical embryo, gaining a donor and avoiding the major problem of transplant surgery: rejection of foreign tissue by the immune system?
Victor is now quite well and looking forward to some extensive globe trotting - patients have to remain in the UK for the first six months after a transplant in case of rejection.
One worry is that drugs used to prevent rejection of a transplant depress the immune system, and "cancers can grow rapidly afterward, " said the UCSF's Dr. Tempero.
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The current face transplant patient understood the risk of rejection and of immunosuppressants, doctors said.
The breakthrough could lead to patients creating their own replacement organs without the risk of rejection, a common complication in transplant procedures.
Neither does eliminating rejection increase the supply of organs for transplant, even though it means that fewer will be wasted.
Three months after their transplant, the patients were weaned off the anti-rejection drug cyclosporine.
If the problem of rejection could be cracked, not only would transplant patients have a better prognosis, but it would also be easier to match patients to donors, and so more transplants could be carried out using the limited number of organs available.
This is because the immune system's rejection response (which obviously did not evolve to frustrate transplant surgery) is actually there to attack tumours.
Mr Nadey Hakim, a surgeon at St Mary's Hospital in London who has taken part in a hand transplant operation in France, said any patient who undergoes the procedure would experience rejection.
Prof Fabre, an academic at King's College London who works on the rejection of organs, and Conservative Montgomeryshire MP Glyn Davies have proposed a national donor and transplant day.
Patients who had a kidney transplant without any kind of pre-operative treatment were not able to be weaned of the anti-rejection drug.
The transplant recipient has to take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of his or her life to prevent rejection of the donated tissue.
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