Transplant

On the rare occasion that a patient's heart and liver are both swapped for a second-hand set from an organ donor, it's because something has gone critically wrong with each.While 31-year-old Washington state resident Adriana Rodriguez met all of the requirements for a heart transplant, her liver was humming along just fine. Nonetheless, surgeons swapped it out in a two-for-one deal in a historic first.A team of medical researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine in the US made the landmark decision…

The team at eGenesis is using CRISPR to address this risk. “You can use CRISPR-Cas9 to inactivate the 50 to 70 copies of retrovirus in the genome,” says Mike Curtis, president and chief executive officer at eGenesis. The edits prevent retroviruses from being able to replicate, he says. Scientists at the company perform other gene edits, too. Several serve to “knock out” pig genes whose protein products trigger harmful immune responses in humans. And the team members insert seven human genes, which they believe should…

Surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who was once hailed as a pioneer of stem cell medicine, was found guilty of gross assault against three of his patients today and sentenced to 2 years and 6 months in prison by an appeals court in Stockholm. The ruling comes a year after a Swedish district court found Macchiarini guilty of bodily harm in two of the cases and gave him a suspended sentence. After both the prosecution and Macchiarini appealed that ruling, the Svea Court of…

As organ transplant science advances, its biggest hurdles are increasingly logistical ones—such as securing a flight and navigating through traffic fast enough to deliver an organ before it deteriorates. Enter the drone, for which researchers recently documented a milestone test in Science Robotics. After hundreds of practice flights, their drone carried a human donor lung on a five-minute journey from the roof of Toronto Western Hospital to Toronto General Hospital for a successful transplant. The trip can take 25…

A Spanish hospital has successfully completed what is believed to be the world’s first fully robotic lung transplant.  Surgeons at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona used a four-arm robot dubbed ‘Da Vinci’ to carry out the procedure. The patient was a 65-year-old man called Xavier, requiring a lung transplant due to pulmonary fibrosis, a life-threatening lung disease.   Typical lung transplants are highly invasive: a 30 cm incision must be made in the chest and multiple ribs…

Australia is poised to undertake its first clinical trial using fecal transplantation to treat blood cancer patients who’ve developed serious complications following bone marrow transplantation.In graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD), the immune cells in a donor’s bone marrow (the graft) attack the organs and tissues of the person who received the transplant (the host). GVHD can be particularly devastating for people who’ve received a bone marrow transplant to treat cancer.“A bone marrow transplant can be a double-edged…

Actress-singer Selena Gomez will "never ever, ever be more in debt" to anyone than actress Francia Raisa. The 30-year-old singer-and-actress received a kidney transplant from the `Grown-ish` star in 2017 to help combat the health issues she was suffering as a result of auto-immune condition lupus and she`s paid tribute to her "best friend" for her selfless gesture, acknowledging she was "so, so, so lucky", reports `Female First UK`. Speaking on Apple TV+ documentary series `Dear...`, Selena said: "My best friend. Her…

A 53-year-old from Düsseldorf in Germany has become the third person in the world to be completely cured of HIV following a stem cell transplant using donor cells with a particular genetic mutation.Like the “Berlin patient” and the “London patient” before him, the “Düsseldorf patient” received treatment for an acute blood disease and, in the process, was cured of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), according to a recent study published by the University Hospital, Düsseldorf.HIV is classified…

Illustration: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)A fifth known person has likely been cured of HIV following a specialized stem cell transplant. According to the man’s doctors, he has lived essentially free of the virus for about a decade. Though the treatment isn’t practical for the general population living with HIV, the knowledge gained from these patients may help scientists figure out a more scalable cure down the road.The 53-year-old German resident, known only as the Düsseldorf patient (after the city in Germany) underwent…

A bone marrow transplant, also known as a stem cell transplant, is a medical procedure in which a patient’s damaged or diseased bone marrow is replaced with healthy cells from a donor. The procedure is used to treat blood-related cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma, as well as other disorders such as sickle cell anemia and thalassemia.The new drug has been shown to be faster and has fewer negative side effects compared to the current standard treatment.A team of researchers at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai…