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Tampa, Fla. (Feb. 01, 2010) – A research team from the National Taiwan University Hospital has evaluated the efficiency of transplanted hepatocyte (liver) cells in animal models severely damaged by two kinds of chemical toxicity to see whether and how transplanted hepatocytes were able to efficiently repopulate the toxin-induced, severely damaged livers. The results of this study are published in the current double issue of Cell Transplantation (18:10/11) and are freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/ . The study was carried out in the on-going effort to evaluate hepatocyte transplantation as an alternative to liver transplantation, not only because of the...

They were strangers living in different parts of the world till about three months ago, when terminal liver failure brought them together in Delhi. Now, 18-month-old Nigerian boy Dike and 44-year-old Mumbai resident Priya have become India's first patients to successfully undergo a swap liver transplant surgery. Unable to find suitable donors with a matching blood group for either Dike or Priya, doctors from Sir Ganga Ram Hospital decided to try out a liver swap, much on the lines of a swap kidney transplant, which has now become common. Five months after his birth, doctors diagnosed Dike with Billiary Atresia...

POSTED AT 12:55 PM ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2009 BY ED MORRISSEY SHARE ON FACEBOOK | PRINTER-FRIENDLY Decades ago, Congress mandated that Medicare cover the treatment of end-stage renal disease (ESRD), including dialysis and transplants, for most patients in the US. Currently, the system covers 250,000 people receiving very expensive dialysis treatments, which costs just under $10,000 per patient per month, which is why so many people want to increase the transplant pool, as it would both save lives and greatly decrease costs. However, the system has a limit on support for the transplant medications needed to keep transplanted kidneys viable,...

President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Cass Sunstein, says that organs for transplant shortages could be averted by reforming the protocol that determines when organs may be harvested from donors. Currently, persons wishing to donate organs must sign permission documents in advance. Many do not. The number of organs available for transplant would be larger if explicit permission were not required. “Just because a person is born with an organ doesn’t mean he is entitled to keep it if a greater need could be served by a different disposition of this asset,”...

Most people have a strong aversion to the idea of receiving a donor organ from a killer, a study suggests. Those questioned said they would be far happier receiving a transplant from someone with a good moral background, the Cheltenham Science Festival heard. It follows on from research which found one in three organ transplant patients believe they have taken on some aspects of the donor's personality. < snip > They were shown pictures of strangers and asked to rate how happy they would be to receive an organ from them. The students were then shown the photos a second...

Three heart transplants were successfully performed with infant donors whose hearts had stopped beating, according to researchers here, but some ethicists question whether moral boundaries were crossed. The report in the Aug. 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reopened a long-simmering debate that boils down to the question of how to define death of a potential donor before organ harvesting may proceed. The three recipients, mean age 2.2 months, have survived at least 3.5 years with only one having a rejection episode during the first six months after surgery, reported Mark M. Boucek, M.D., and colleagues of...

Organs from pigs could be widely available for transplanting into patients in a decade, Lord Winston said yesterday. The first organs suitable for transplanting, most likely kidneys, are expected to be ready within three years and, if tests are successful, their use could be widespread by 2018. A herd of as few as 50 pigs is expected to be kept as breeding stock to provide organs “to order” and to slash waiting times for thousands of people needing transplants. Professor Winston, of Imperial College, London, and his collaborator, Carol Readhead, of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, are leading research...

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a leading monitor of bioethics issues such as assisted suicide, euthanasia and human cloning. File this in the “As If We Don't Already Have Enough to Worry About” file: Leading members of the organ transplantation community—backed by some bioethicists—have been waging a quiet campaign for more than ten years to do away with the “dead donor rule,” a crucial ethical protection that requires donors of non paired vital organs to have died before their...

SEATTLE - Timothy Garon's face and arms are hauntingly skeletal, but the fluid building up in his abdomen makes the 56-year-old musician look eight months pregnant. His liver, ravaged by hepatitis C, is failing. Without a new one, his doctors tell him, he will be dead in days. But Garon's been refused a spot on the transplant list, largely because he has used marijuana, even though it was legally approved for medical reasons. "I'm not angry, I'm not mad, I'm just confused," said Garon, lying in his hospital bed a few minutes after a doctor told him the hospital transplant...

....In one celebrated case uncovered by Professor Schwartz's team, an 18-year-old boy who wrote poetry, played music and composed songs was killed in a car crash. A year after he died, his parents came across a tape of a song he had written, entitled, Danny, My Heart Is Yours. In his haunting lyrics, the boy sang about how he felt destined to die and donate his heart. After his death, his heart was transplanted into an 18-year-old girl - named Danielle. When the boy's parents met Danielle, they played some of his music and she, despite never having heard the...

There's new hope for the five million people in the United States who live with heart failure. Scientists say they have been able to grow a rat heart in a lab. They were also successful at getting it to start beating. About 50,000 people die each year waiting for a heart donor. But that all may change thanks to a rat heart, built by scientists at the University of Minnesota. "Everyone has cells," Dr. Doris Taylor told CBN News. "What's lacking is a way to put that together in a 3-D structure that lets you create an organ," she explained....

Heading home. A glowing stem cell transplant searches out a place to settle down.Credit: Deepta Bhattacharya, Agnieszka Czechowicz, and Irving Weissman A new treatment might allow patients to avoid some of the grueling side effects of bone marrow transplants. Researchers reported in the 23 November issue of Science that they can use a specific type of antibody to clear away old marrow stem cells in mice, allowing fresh ones to take their place. The discovery could allow patients to receive bone marrow without undergoing chemotherapy and other toxic procedures. Bone marrow transplants can ameliorate diseases such as sickle cell anemia...

Three Philadelphia-Area Funeral Directors Nabbed in Scheme Selling Body Parts Thursday, October 04, 2007 PHILADELPHIA — Three funeral directors sold hundreds of bodies to a former oral surgeon who allegedly collected the bones, tissue and skin from the corpses to be used in transplants, a grand jury charged Thursday after a 16-month investigation. The 244 bodies fetched about $1,000 each, the grand jury found, with the body parts being transplanted in unsuspecting medical patients worldwide. Michael Mastromarino, who operated the now-defunct Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., ran the scheme with help from a team of "cutters" who stole...

The Ministry of Health is gearing up to introduce a nationwide definition of brain death to facilitate human organ transplants, said Vice-Minister Huang Jiefu. The authorities will start mapping out the criteria needed to define brain death in October. Huang made the remarks at the just concluded China Organ Transplant Forum in Beijing, which was organized to bring together experts to provide suggestions on how the legislation and standards governing organ transplants could be improved. "Determining the criteria is the key to our most important goal - producing legislation on brain death," Huang said. It is officially estimated that 2...

LOS ANGELES - Allegations that a transplant surgeon tried to speed a patient's death to recover his organs could dissuade potential donors at a time when the national waiting list for critical organs keeps growing, some experts say. "One of the biggest fears that people have about organ donation is that their death will be hastened if they're identified as a donor," bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania and MSNBC.com contributor said Tuesday. "The transplant community has struggled mightily to allay the fears." Any dip in the organ donation rate related to the case would likely have the...

Everyone should automatically become an organ donor in order to prevent hundreds of deaths each year, the Government's chief doctor said today. Sir Liam Donaldson called for a change in the law so only those who register their objections are exempt from donating their organs after their death. He said one person dies each day in the UK waiting for a donor and the change could increase the number of organs available. The shortage is fuelling "transplant tourism" where UK patients travel abroad and often pay for a donor organ which puts them at unnecessary risk, Sir Liam said. The...

On May 4, The Yangtze Evening News reported that China's most famous kidney expert, Dr. Li Baochun, had committed suicide by jumping from the twelfth floor of the Shanghai No. 2 Military Medical University Shanghai Hospital Building. Dr. Li had served as Deputy Director of the hospital and as Professor and Chief Physician for kidney disease. The report said Dr. Li's suicide was caused by depression. On May 24, The Yangtze Evening News report was reproduced on several major websites including the website of China's most important official media, www.xinhua.net. Further analysis revealed that the cause of Dr. Li's depression...

Organ Transplants in China: Just Like Picking Lobsters in Restaurant By Lee Yuhan Sound of Hope Radio Network May 31, 2007 The Human Rights and Medicine Forum drew an interested crowd to the University of Chicago on May 24. Canadian Independent Investigator David Matas, coauthor of "Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China," Dr. Kirk C. Allison, Director of the Program in Human Rights and Health, University of Minnesota, and Falun Gong Spokesperson Zhang Erping attended the Forum. Two of the University of Chicago Student clubs, Falun Gong and Amnesty International, sponsored the Forum. The...

Foreign patients who travel to China for transplants are likely receiving organs culled from political prisoners who are alive when their corneas, kidneys and livers are harvested, then left to die, an international group of doctors armed with a chilling Canadian report is warning.In a new twist on an old practice of using organs from executed criminals, China has since 2000 turned to living donors and outlawed Falun Gong members to supply a growing trade in medical transplants, Doctors Against Organ Harvesting said yesterday during a public forum held at the University of Toronto. With increasing numbers of Canadians on...

"Transplant tourism" on rise due to donor shortages By Laura MacInnis GENEVA - "Transplant tourism" is on the rise because organ donations are not keeping up with growing demand, especially for kidneys, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. The United Nations agency said it was concerned about a rise in cases where people in countries such as Pakistan, Egypt and the Philippines were persuaded to sell their body parts to outsiders, mostly through a broker. The practice has increased over the past decade, said Luc Noel of the WHO's health technology and pharmaceuticals unit. "We believe 5 to...