MEHMET OZ, MD: There are several other medications that are very important and which we've built upon cyclosporine. There are drugs that prevent the bone marrow from producing too many white cells, and there are several new classes of these drugs as well. In addition, there are steroids, which is something that is feared by many because it makes you look not too good and makes you act strange, but in fact it's a nice way of calming the immune system. If you put these new classes of drugs together and combine them with what we currently have available, which are very selective blockers against very specific types of antibodies and immune cells, we've got a whole potpourri of drugs that we can use to specifically target your therapy. This has changed the face of heart transplant surgery. So although we get all the glamour as heart transplant surgeons because we can sew the organs in, the battle is won and lost in the postoperative period by physicians who are able to tailor your therapy using new drugs that have been developed over the past two decades.
DAVID R. MARKS, MD: You alluded to some of the side effects. Why don't you go through some of the most common ones?
MEHMET OZ, MD: The most important side effect is infection, still. Although these drugs are very effective at minimally hindering your ability to resist infection, they do hinder, in fact, your ability to fight off invaders from outside. So for someone like Frank, my biggest concern is that although I'm preventing from killing his heart, he'll develop infections. In addition, some of these drugs are toxic to the kidneys, and many patients after heart transplantation will in fact have renal problems, and that's one of the problems that we're guarding against, and newer drugs are coming out that may help us more along these lines.
