transplantation

RayMond Hamilton and Sheila Campbell have known each other since they were kids growing up in Fort Worth. Decades after they first met, Sheila would be there for RayMond in the most meaningful way - donating one of her kidneys to save his life following his two-plus-year ordeal with chronic kidney disease.

Scientists are making a major leap toward freezing organs for future use without damaging them. A new study reveals that one of the biggest obstacles—cracking during ultra-cold preservation—can be reduced by carefully tuning the temperature at which tissues enter a glass-like state. This breakthrough builds on recent successes in cryopreserved organ transplants and could bring the long-imagined i…

Advances in pediatric heart care are helping more children survive long enough to receive a transplant-but a critical shortage of donor hearts means too many are still dying while they wait, experts warned today at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) 46th Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions.

As demand for heart transplants continues to far exceed the number of available donor hearts, experts at today's 46th Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) explored a critical question: how should this scarce, life-saving resource be allocated?

Today at the 46th Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT), Eileen Hsich, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, outlined a bold vision for the future of heart transplantation that moves beyond national borders to address global inequities in organ allocation.

Today at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) 46th Annual meeting and Scientific Sessions, transplant specialists Brian Keller, MD, PhD, and Thomas Egan, MD debated an ethically fraught question: How old is too old for a lung transplant?

Every second counts in the life-saving world of medical transplants. To help address that urgency, NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is teaming up with the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to explore faster, more reliable ways to transport donor organs using advanced aviation technologies.  NASA Langley and UNOS will collaborate under a new Space Act Agreement announced …

UPMC and University of Pittsburgh clinician-scientists have weaned and kept multiple liver transplantation patients off of all immunosuppressant drugs for more than three years through a first-in-human clinical trial of a unique "immune priming" therapy.

People who have elevated levels of donor-specific anti-HLA antibodies (DSAs) -- immune system proteins that can target and attack donor stem cells -- wait an average of three additional months to receive blood or bone marrow transplants from a healthy donor, according to recent research from investigators at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. Those most likely to be affected are Black women …

By developing precise techniques to stitch blood vessels and restore their function, Carrel made it possible to maintain blood flow during surgery and laid the foundation for modern vascular repair and organ transplantation

Scientists from Great Ormond Street Hospital and UCL have created the first lab-grown oesophagus and have implanted it in pigs, … read more

Each year, thousands of people in the U.S. die waiting for donated organs. A new book shares how organs from other species could change that.

The bottle looks ordinary enough. Press the nozzle, and a fine mist settles over a glistening organ surface, disappearing almost instantly into the wet tissue. What it leaves behind, invisible to the naked eye, is perhaps the most clinically useful thing: a coat of microscopic drug-loaded beads that grip the tissue like a mussel grips wet rock, and release their payload slowly, over weeks, direct…

Researchers have developed an injectable, self-assembling miniature liver to help patients awaiting organ transplants.

Your liver handles roughly 500 jobs, from scrubbing bacteria out of your blood to breaking down every paracetamol you’ve ever swallowed. Lose it and you’re in deep trouble. More than 10,000 Americans sit on the transplant waitlist for one right now, and plenty of those who need a new liver will never qualify for the surgery because they’re simply too sick to survive it. That catch-22 has driven S…

By: Christopher Lawrence In two cases with graft dysfunction and elevated cfDNA but normal or borderline biopsy findings, MMDx Kidney identified early AMBR, which responded to treatment. MMDx Kidney in addition to local histopathology findings gives clinicians increased confidence in the diagnosis and treatment of allograft dysfunction. It is suggested that early diagnosis and treatment will impr…

By: Christopher Lawrence A US payer budget model demonstrates that MMDx Kidney is a cost-effective intervention despite the cost of the assay and the higher treatment costs associated with identifying more rejection. The authors (including Dr. Chris Lawrence, Sr. Director, Business Development and Medical Affairs) present a budget impact model to estimate the economic impact to a US commercial pa…

Publication Summary By: Christopher Lawrence With the 2017 classification for kidney allograft pathology Banff may have taken a retrograde step in the identification and prognostication of antibody mediated rejection. This study highlights the over simplification of the diagnosis of ABMR leading to a group of patients with less good outcomes being reclassified as ‘no ABMR’. The authors propose ne…

Publication Summary By: Christopher Lawrence Long-term kidney transplant graft and patient survival has consistently improved with time. Much of the gain is attributed to superior understanding of pre-transplant immunological risk. Making further gains in graft and patient survival depends upon a holistic approach to reduce causes of graft loss and death. Whilst rejection remains an important cau…