[Video clip of Tammy Seward receiving a home dialysis treatment]

Speaker 1: After two and a half years of daily home dialysis treatments, Tammy Seward was ecstatic to finally receive a kidney transplant. But a day after returning home from the hospital, her body began rejecting the donor organ.

[Text on screen: The Ohio State University
Wexner Medical Center
Tammy Seward
Kidney transplant patient]

Tammy Seward: It's hard because you think, you're gonna get this kidney, and you're gonna be okay, and you don't have to do it no more, and then that rejection came in within like six days or seven days.

[Video clip of an operating room]

Speaker 1: About one in four transplant patients develops antibodies that attack the donor organ, making it more likely that the transplant will fail.

[Text on screen: Dr. Ginny Bumgardner
Ohio State Wexner Medical Center]

Speaker Dr. Ginny Bumgardner: The antibody can cause immediate damage to the organ or acute rejection, and it can also cause long-term graft rejection, which means that that patient's organ is not going to last as long.

[Video clip of Dr. Bumgardner and another individual working in a lab]

Speaker 1: Doctor Ginny Bumgardner and her team at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center examined why these antibodies develop in some patients and not others, and in a new study, discovered an immune cell that inhibits the development of antibodies that may predict a patient's likelihood of organ rejection.

Speaker Dr. Bumgardner: This cell type was very interesting because it had the capacity to reduce antibody production in transplant recipients.

[Video clip of Dr. Ginny Bumgardner analyzing test results in a lab]

Speaker 1: Those with high levels of the cell were less likely to develop harmful antibodies and the complications that come with them. Researchers hope the discovery of the cell will not only assess risk of organ rejection, but will lead to therapies to reduce that risk.

Speaker Dr. Bumgardner: If we increase the number of these cells in the patients who seem to have a relative deficit of them, would that prevent them from developing antibody after transplant?

[Video clip of Tammy Seward sitting at a table with family]

Speaker 1: Tammy is back on the transplant list and is hoping this research can help her and the more than 110,000 others waiting for a life-saving organ.

Speaker Seward: That'd make my day and make me happy that you can do that and not to reject another kidney.

[Text on screen: The Ohio State University
Wexner Medical Center]