Dealing With Rejection

A recent break-through discovery by a team of British Heart Foundation (BHF) researchers could radically improve the success rates of heart transplant procedures. Work like this would not be possible without gifts in Wills left to the BHF. These gifts fund half their pioneering research

Over the past few years, hundreds of heart transplants have taken place in the UK, saving hundreds of lives (see, for example, Andrew Britton’s story on pages 40 and 50).

Advances in medicine have dramatically increased the success rates of transplant operations since their early days in the late 1960s, but one of the major challenges facing researchers remains transplant rejection. This occurs when the immune system recognises a new heart as a foreign object and responds by attacking it, just as it would an infection.