Novel Kidney Auto Transplantation Technique for Ischemia-Reperfusion Studies

Large animal studies of long-term ischemia reperfusion are hampered by the use of immunosuppressive drugs to inhibit the influence of the allogeneic response. In small animals, this can be controlled by using inbred strains of the animal. For obvious reasons, this is not possible in large animals such as pigs. Since studies in pigs usually are the last step before first-in-man studies, this remains a problem trying to resemble a clinical situation. In the following short paper, we describe a novel auto kidney transplantation model that can be used for long term ischemia reperfusion studies. We also suggest a control setting to balance out the possible influence of an increased surgical trauma.