Perioperative donor bone marrow infusion in recipients of organ allografts.

D ESPITE its attended complications. immunosuppression for graft acceptance and the impending threat of chronic rejection are two of the many overwhelming factors that have necessitated the implementation of strategies aimed at inducing donor-specific tolerance (OST). With the postulation that persistence of donor cell chimerism after organ transplantation (Tx) may play a notable role in allograft acceptance and the establishment of OST,I-3 we initiated a prospective clinical trial to deliberately augment this phenomenon by peri operative donor bone marrow (BM) infusion. We report here the outcome in 198 study patients with a follow-up of 5 to 1387 days. Also summarized are the results in 115 allograft recipients who, owing to unavailability of consent to retrieve vertebral bodies (VB) from the cadaveric donors. were monitored as co etaneous controls.