Study Status: Enrolling by invitation
Recruit Status: Enrolling by invitation
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: The Pittsburgh Protocol in Human Upper Extremity Allotransplantation
Brief Summary:
Overall Goal
To establish hand transplantation as a safe and effective reconstructive strategy for the treatment of upper extremity amputations.
Specific Aim
To reduce the risk of rejection and enable allograft survival while minimizing the requirement for long term high dose immunosuppression.
For this purpose, we propose to utilize the "Pittsburgh Protocol", which is an immunomodulatory strategy that has been implemented in solid organ transplants at UPMC. Early results in living related liver and kidney patients have confirmed that this protocol provides the means to allow graft survival with minimization of maintenance immunosuppression and even allows weaning of some patients from long-term immunosuppression.We hypothesize that a similar protocol can enable graft survival in highly immunogenic composite tissue allografts like hand transplants while reducing the number,dosing and/or frequency of immunosuppressive drugs associated with serious adverse effects.