cyclosporin

My clinical picture looks like acute Hep-C infection.  The assessment is that it is probably not the really dangerous kind (at least for now), but something that should be treatable, kinehora!  

They want to start me on a three-drug cocktail: interferon, telaprevir, ribavirin. Interferon to boost the immune response, teleprevir (just approved in April of 2011) which gets the Hep-C directly and ribavirin which suppresses the mutated Hep-C (that's evolution, baby!). Since teleprevir
interferes with the excretion of my current immunosuppression drug tacrolimus ("fk"), the first step is to change to the older drug cyclosporin.

A little background on cyclosporin from Wikipedia:

Initially isolated from the fungus Tolpocladium infaltum  isolated from a soil sample obtained by Sandoz scientists at Hardangervidda, Norway in 1969...The success of cyclosporin in preventing organ rejection was shown in kidney transplants by Calne and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, and in liver transplants performed by Dr. Thomas Starzl at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital. The first patient, on 9 March 1980, was a 28-year-old woman.

And I was Dr. Starzl's experimental patient number seventy!