transplants

Partial Heart Transplants Grow with Their Young RecipientsA heart valve transplant could save the life of a baby—or twoBy Tanya Lewis Children who are born with heart valve defects often undergo surgery to receive frozen valves from cadavers. Because thawed cadaver tissue is dead and doesn’t grow, however, the child must periodically have operations to get larger valves—which can lead to a poor prognosis. But in a new procedure known as a partial heart transplant, living valves and parts of blood vessels can be…

My version of Livingston, Mont., where I have lived since 1987, began with a kind of impoverished, artistic chain migration: My father and his best friend were writers. The best friend moved here in the late ’60s, and other friends — a painter, more writers — followed and stayed. As a teenager, I visited twice with my family and the area became a dream in the back of my head. At 27, when I decided to blow up my first career and leave New York City with a boyfriend, the painter offered us an old house for $150 a month.…

Just a few miles away in Limpopo, white families lived in big, attractive houses, with easy access to all these things. The older Sefala became, the more she peppered her father with questions about the visible racial segregation of their neighborhood: “Why is it like this?” Now, at 28, she is helping do something about it. Alongside computer scientists Nyalleng Moorosi and Timnit Gebru at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which Gebru set up in 2021, she is deploying computer vision tools and…

Dropping an ice crystal into a bottle of near-frozen water produces a dramatic effect: very quickly, the liquid crystallizes into a block of ice.At the molecular level, an ice crystal has a distinct shape—a lattice structure. As incoming water molecules reshape to join the lattice, the crystal grows.Some researchers think an analogous process underlies Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses. According to this theory, these diseases begin when a particular protein misfolds, or fails…

A biotech company called eGenesis is experimenting with transplanting the hearts of young gene-edited pigs into baby baboons as part of a study that could pave the way for similar transplants in human babies. It hopes to transplant pig hearts into babies with serious heart defects as early as next year, in a bid to buy them more time to wait for a human heart.The company has developed a technique that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make around 70 edits to a pig’s genome. In theory, these edits should allow the…

A phase 1 clinical trial exploring the use of fecal transplants to supplement immunotherapy treatment for melanoma has found it to be safe and has the potential to improve patients’ response to treatment.More and more research has highlighted the importance of the gut microbiome to overall health and the development of diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, intestinal bowel diseases and several cancers. Fecal transplants, the transfer of fecal bacteria and other microbes from a healthy individual into another, have…

Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) is a type of bacterium that can cause infection in the gut, leading to symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, and fever. C. diff infections are often a result of an imbalance in the gut microbiome, which can occur after taking antibiotics.According to a recent Cochrane Review, stool transplantation has proven to be a more effective method of treating Clostridioides difficile infection as compared to standard antibiotic treatment. According to a recent Cochrane Review headed by a…

The gold standard for storing lungs for transplant procedures has been to pack them in ice in coolers, which keeps them at roughly 4 °C (39 °F). But a look back at lung transplant research has revealed that there's an even better temperature at which to store donor lungs, which will dramatically improve the time during which they remain viable.The first lung transplant was conducted in 1963. Since that time, when lungs are removed from patients, they are packed in a cooler with ice and rushed to the location of the…

Healthy mitochondria, those tiny cellular structures high school biology teachers often tout as “the powerhouses of the cell,” are a necessity for producing energy in the body—but new research supports the idea that they are more than just adenosine triphosphate (ATP)–pumping machines. For about a decade, scientists have experimented with transplanting these microscopic organelles to treat damaged hearts and other tissues, and they have seen a handful of successful outcomes in human trials. But the role mitochondria play…

The breakthrough launched a debate: What do we make now? One faction wanted to grow a face, but the faction that wanted to try a hand won. They imagined a five-fingered structure that could be snipped open at the wrist, slid on like a glove, then sutured. “You would only have to apply bandages around the wrist area—and that would be the surgery,” Abaci says.So the lab printed a five-fingered scaffold about the size of a sugar packet, prepared the cells as they had before, and then tested how well the “edgeless” construct…