Vitiligo Melanocyte Transfer
Many have heard that some forms of vitiligo can be treated with surgical approaches, like skin or cellular grafts. The idea is that the top skin layer of the white spots is removed, and healthy pigment cells (melanocytes) from another part of the body are transplanted there. After a few months, the transplanted melanocytes start working to make pigment, which deposits in the surrounding skin and the white spots disappear. This can be a very effective treatment for some patients, and many times the standard vitiligo treatments are no longer needed. The caveat is that it doesn’t work for every, or even most, patients.
The problem is that the white spots appear in the first place because immune cells crawl into the skin, find the melanocytes (the pigment factories), and kill them. Then there is no more pigment production and the skin turns white. Typically, if you go through a procedure to transplant more melanocytes to that spot, the immune cells simply crawl in and kill the new ones too. However when the disease is stable, in that the immune system is quiet and no longer attacking the melanocytes, the newly transplanted melanocytes can survive and start working. The problem is that it is very difficult to know when the disease is stable, and dermatologists who perform this procedure usually require that patients have no new or expanding lesions for 1-2 years. But even then, the procedure is only effective 40-50% of the time, and it may fail later if the disease becomes active again, which is often unpredictable.