• Facebook Helping Find Organ Donors

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    • 3rd Jan 2012

    • Early on when Facebook was created it was used to find old friends and stay in contact with people we care but didn’t necessarily have time to call or meet. Nowadays it is used to save people’s lives. Social media have expanded their role and now it goes beyond imagination. Patients waiting for organ transplant now turn toward Facebook in order to increase their pool of potential organ donors. Most of the living donors are giving one of their kidneys.

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  • Grandpa Could Become a Living Kidney Donor

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    • 31st Oct 2011

    • It is now proven that people over the age of 70 years old can safely become a living organ donor for kidney transplant.  A study that will come out in the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology is showing there is no more risk for elderly to become organ donor than younger donors.  The investigators have studied more than 200 living kidney donor over the age of 70 and compared them with healthy people of the same age.  The

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  • United Kingdom’s Strategy to Boost Organ Donation: Free Funerals

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    • 11th Oct 2011

    • This is no joke.  Britain’s health system is strongly considering offering free funerals to organ donors as a way to increase their donation rate.  More than 18 million people are registered donors but only 1,000 do so every year.  This is the lowest organ donation rate of Europe and half the US’s.  No maximum amount was set for funeral expenses. That is an original way of promoting organ donation but is not without any controversy.   John Harris, a bioethics professor

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  • Steve Jobs Received a Liver Transplant per the Rules

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    • 10th Oct 2011

    • I have read a lot of misinformation lately about Steve Jobs regarding his 2009 liver transplant.  Even at the time it was make public a couple of years ago, that misinformation was coming out.  A lot of people are saying that Steve Jobs received a liver transplant by bypassing the waiting list.  I will tell you that it is impossible because the rules are so strict.  A transplant center can be put on probation or even be shut down by

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  • Could Stem Cell Therapy Eliminate the Need for Immunosuppressant in Kidney Transplant?

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    • 7th Oct 2011

    •                  According to Dr Samuel Strober, an immunologist and professor of medicine at Stanford, stem cells therapy could potentially eliminate the need for long term use of immunosuppressant therapy such as prograf, prednisone, cellcept, etc.  They have enrolled 12 patients who underwent “perfect” match kidney transplant.  A perfect match would be a kidney received from a living donor which most likely is a relative.  Out of those 12 patients, 8 of them have

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  • First Lung Transplant in US Using Ex Vivo Perfusion

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    • 10th Sep 2011

    • The University of Maryland Medical Center was the first center in the US to perform a lung transplant using ex-vivo perfusion.  The procedure is used to make the lungs more suitable for organ transplantation.  Only 15-20% of all donors end up giving their lungs due to several factors.  This is a very low number compared to kidneys and liver who are used a lot more. The lungs are very susceptible to their environment especially in a context of a brain

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  • New Heart Transplant Device Use to Deliver Warm (Heart) Organ

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    • 31st Aug 2011

    • A new device being tested at UCLA Medical Center in California is use to deliver heart ready for transplant. Traditionally organs are delivered on ice from the organ donor site to the recipient hospital. As soon as the heart is removed from the body it is put on ice in a cooler and has to be used within 4 hours. The heart is then on “pause” and race against time starts so the heart spends as little time as possible

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  • New medication to prevent CMV for organ transplant recipient?

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    • 30th Aug 2011

    • Let’s come back to Letermovir.  It has also obtained the status of “Orphan Drug” in the European Union (EU).  That status is reserved for drugs used to treat rare disease that affects a minority of the population.  The drug company is given tax breaks and marketing exclusivity for 7 years in the US and 10 years in EU.  This is an incentive that was created by the governments to incite drug companies to develop medicine against rare disease.  CMV is

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  • Voice Box Transplantation: Be Heard Again

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    • 21st Jun 2011

    • The more I read the news about organ transplant the more I am amaze at what scientists are trying to do.  After face transplant, arm transplant, uterine transplant now we have voice box transplant.  This has to be a very complicated surgery where nerves have to be connected together.  A group of Doctors in UK is planning to perform the first surgery of this kind in that country but it will be the third in the world.   Professor Martin Birchall,

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  • Pigs to Provide Human Organs for Transplantation

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    • 20th Jun 2011

    • Thanks to a breakthrough in stem cells research, we are getting closer to have pigs be used to grow organs for human transplantation.  According to the article in the Telegraph, researchers created rats organs in mice by injecting stem cells into their embryo.   The same science would be used to grow human organs in pigs.  Pigs have an anatomy somewhat close to the one of a human and they are mass produced.  One of the major benefit of this new

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