[Treatment of rejection with deoxyspergualin after renal transplantation]

Deoxyspergualin (DSG), which is a new immunosuppressive drug developed in Japan, is expected to be an immunosuppressant for the treatment of rejection, because it has immunosuppressive action different from that of other drugs. In the present study we used DSG to treat renal allograft rejection of in total 17 cases; 6 cases with acute rejection, 8 with chronic rejection and 3 with acute on chronic rejection. We infused DSG very slowly over 3 hours at a dose of 3-7 mg/kg/day for 5-7 days. Four cases (44.4%) with acute or acute on chronic rejection showed excellent response to DSG, three cases (33.3%) showed fair response and two cases (22.3%) did not respond at all. We also used DSG in patients with chronic rejection. In many of them, the increase in serum creatinine was suppressed. Ten of the total patients (58.8%) developed side effects including leukocytopenia, thrombocytopenia, numbness of the fact etc. No patients needed discontinuation of DSG. From the above results, we think that DSG is a safe and effective drug to treat acute rejection. Furthermore, we could get the results which suggest that DSG is effective for the treatment of chronic rejection.