UC San Diego Health is the first hospital on the West Coast to perform heart transplant surgery from a donor after circulatory death using a new portable organ care system. The investigational procedure could significantly decrease transplant waiting list times and improve patient outcomes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins Medicine Media Relations is focused on disseminating current, accurate and useful information to the public via the media. As part of that effort, we are distributing our “COVID-19 Tip Sheet: Story Ideas from Johns Hopkins” every other Tuesday.
NYU Langone Transplant Institute and Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital launch a new Pediatric Heart Failure and Transplant Program, expanding regional access to specialized care for children with complex cardiac needs
With more than 109,000 people on the transplant waiting list nationwide, the need for organ donors remains great. A Penn State Health transplant surgeon explains how donors and recipients are kept safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
UC San Diego Health is the first hospital in San Diego and only health care system in Southern California to transplant a liver from a donor with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) into an HIV-positive recipient. The surgery is part of a national clinical trial.
For patients who receive a heart transplant in the near future, the old adage, “Good things come in small packages,” may become words to live by. In a recent study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) demonstrated in mice that they can easily deliver a promising anti-rejection drug directly to the area surrounding a grafted heart by packaging it within a tiny three-dimensional, protein gel cocoon known as a hydrogel. Best of all, the researchers say that the release of the drug is spread out over time, making it highly regulatable and eliminating the need for daily medication to keep rejection in check.
DALLAS, Sept. 2, 2020 – Less than three weeks after getting on an organ transplant list for HIV-positive patients, John Welch got the call. A liver was available from a deceased donor, and it was an excellent match.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Missouri developed a new microgel drug delivery method that could extend the effectiveness of pancreatic islet transplantations — from several years to possibly the entire lifespan of a recipient.
Patients who develop cytomegalovirus infections after allogeneic stem cell transplantation may be able to develop an immunity against the virus, strengthen their immune system and reduce reliance on strong antiviral medications, a team from Roswell Park reports in the journal Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation.
As COVID-19 continues to impact the world, health care professionals are finding more patients who were diagnosed with the illness but still are dealing with symptoms long after the initial infection has gone. This condition is sometimes referred to as “long COVID.”
Hepatocytes – the chief functional cells of the liver – are natural regenerators, and the lymph nodes serve as a nurturing place where they can multiply. Researchers demonstrated that large animals with ailing livers can grow a new organ in their lymph nodes from their own hepatocytes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins Medicine Media Relations is focused on disseminating current, accurate and useful information to the public via the media. As part of that effort, we are distributing our “COVID-19 Tip Sheet: Story Ideas from Johns Hopkins” every other Tuesday.
A pandemic story with a happy ending. How a baby received a new heart after months of waiting amid the pandemic.
As school districts look ahead to a very different school year, pediatric infectious disease experts from across the United States convened to outline back-to-school safety guidelines for solid organ transplant (SOT) recipients. The group, led by Kevin J. Downes, MD, attending physician in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), published their recommendations today in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.
Missouri S&T has received a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation to develop a new, state-of-the-art, rotational microwave spectrometer on its campus in Rolla.The instrument will be used by several universities to collect some of the most detailed information available about the structure of gas phase molecules.
Two physicians — David Serur, M.D., and Vikram Wadhera, M.B. B.S. — have joined the surgical team at Hackensack Meridian Hackensack University Medical Center’s Division of Organ Transplantation.
Pairing bariatric surgery with LVAD heart surgery may be an effective bridge to heart transplant for obese patients.
To provide another layer of support for lung transplant recipients, the Keck Medicine of USC lung transplant team launched a two-year observational pilot study to monitor patients post-discharge using Bluetooth-enabled devices and computer tablets.
Cardiologist and heart failure expert Sean Pinney, MD, has been named co-director of the Heart & Vascular Center and director of the Advanced Heart Failure, Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support Program at the University of Chicago Medicine.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins Medicine Media Relations is focused on disseminating current, accurate and useful information to the public via the media. As part of that effort, we are distributing our “COVID-19 Tip Sheet: Story Ideas from Johns Hopkins” every Tuesday throughout the duration of the outbreak.
While some hospitals paused or reduced organ transplants, MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute at MedStar Washington Hospital Center performed a record number of heart transplants during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Between March and May, 13 patients received new hearts–-more than double MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute’s typical volumes.
University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) Dean, E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, and Christine Lau, MD, MBA, The Dr. Robert W. Buxton Chair of Surgery at UMSOM, announced today the hiring of two internationally-renown transplant professionals: a surgeon scientist and a transplant scientist. The unique pair of transplant professionals provides UMSOM with a powerful combination of leadership in both clinical surgery and surgical science.
A multidisciplinary team from Columbia Engineering and Vanderbilt University has now demonstrated that severely injured donor lungs that have been declined for transplant can be recovered outside the body by a system that uses cross-circulation of whole blood between the donor lung and an animal host. For the first time, a severely injured human lung that failed to recover using the standard clinical EVLP was successfully recovered during 24 hours on the team’s cross-circulation platform.
New research published in Nature Communications uses a technology first developed at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine to enhance the oxygenation of cultured tissues that will likely be able to conduct real-time regeneration and development studies in the human pancreas.
• A recent study found that most kidney transplant recipients with COVID-19 do not need to be hospitalized. • Another study found that patients on dialysis who develop COVID-19 may have symptoms that are different from other patients with the infectious disease.
Researchers at The Ohio State University College of Medicine are the first to identify an immune cell that may predict a transplant patient’s risk of developing antibodies that can cause organ rejection. This discovery could lead to the development of therapies to prevent complications after transplant surgery.
• Kidney diseases affect more than 850 million people worldwide. • KidneyCure continues to propel positive change in public health, once again funding more than $3 million to support research that changes lives. • This year’s grant recipients, among the best and the brightest in the field, bring energy, innovation and expertise to areas undergoing rapid change: acute kidney injury and repair, home dialysis, and post-transplant care.
A new approach in ophthalmology that offers a revolutionary alternative to corneal transplantation has just been developed by researchers and clinicians in North America, Europe, and Oceania.
After being defunded by a company with rights to its intellectual property, development of a pediatric heart-assist device has been revived at Cornell with the help of a $4.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.
A major study investigating the effectiveness of liver perfusion as a technique to improve the function of donor livers that would have otherwise been rejected has shown that up to 7 in every 10 could be used after just 4-6 hours of the assessment.
For the first time, surgeons at Northwestern Medicine performed a double-lung transplant on a patient whose lungs were damaged by COVID-19. The patient, a Hispanic woman in her 20s, spent six weeks in the COVID ICU on a ventilator and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a life support machine that does the work of the heart and lungs.
Researchers suggest focusing on disparities to help identify which patients with a heart transplant may be at higher risk for a worse course of COVID-19 infection.
Using skin cells from human volunteers, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have created fully functional mini livers, which they then transplanted into rats. In this proof-of-concept experiment, the lab-made organs survived for four days inside their animal hosts.
In March 2020, Hackensack University Medical Center voluntarily inactivated its transplant list and put a hold on performing transplant surgeries due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Throughout the pandemic, Hackensack University Medical Center’s organ transplant physicians continued to provide care to transplant candidates and previous organ recipients through telehealth virtual visits. Hackensack University Medical Center made the decision to reactivate its transplant list and resume offering transplant procedures now that enhanced patient safety measures designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have been successfully implemented across all Hackensack Meridian Health facilities.
• In a study of patients with newly diagnosed kidney failure at 71 kidney centers in the UK, older age, additional illnesses, obesity, and lower socioeconomic status were associated with a lower likelihood of being put on transplant waiting list.
Skin cancer and skin infection are significantly more likely in solid organ transplant patients compared to patients with normal immune system function. Almost 40,000 organ transplants were performed in the United States in 2019, a 9% increase over 2018.
France and the United States have experienced a tremendous reduction in the number of organ donations and transplant procedures since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. By early April, transplant centers in both countries were conducting far fewer deceased donor transplants compared to just one month earlier, with the number of procedures dropping by 91 percent in France and 50 percent in the United States.
A new discovery in mice shows the innate immune system has "memory," previously thought to be a unique feature of the adaptive immune system. Blocking this memory prevented transplanted organs from being rejected, providing a way to more specific drugs that could lengthen organ transplant survival.
• Among adults with kidney failure who were referred for transplantation, 60% of black and 66% of white patients were waitlisted within the first year. Differences in socioeconomic status and comorbidities between black and white patients could explain up to 58% of the disparity in listing. • Fewer black patients on transplant wait lists received transplants compared with white patients, but differences in socioeconomic status and comorbidities did not explain this disparity.
Obese mice with unhealthy lifestyles gain significantly less weight and avoid type 2 diabetes when they receive viruses transplanted from the stool of lean mice. These are the findings of a new University of Copenhagen study.
Researchers from the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center received a $2.8 million, five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute to help develop a blood-based test to improve the selection and prioritization for patients with liver cancer who need a liver transplantation.
• In an analysis of information on adults who began treatment for kidney failure at any Georgia, North Carolina, or South Carolina dialysis facility, the distance from a patient’s residence to the nearest transplant center did not appear to affect the likelihood of transplant-related referrals and evaluations.
Irvine, Calif., March 23, 2020 – Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have shown that they can give cells a short-term boost of energy through mitochondrial transplantation. The team’s study, published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, suggests that mitochondrial transplantation could one day be employed to cure various cardiovascular, metabolic and neurodegenerative disorders – and even offer a new approach to the treatment of cancer.
Inspired by a tactic cancer cells use to evade the immune system, University of Pittsburgh researchers have engineered tiny particles that can trick the body into accepting transplanted tissue as its own, while leaving the immune system intact.
• In a study of kidney transplant recipients, the composition of certain immune cells in the blood 1 year after kidney transplantation was linked with a patient’s subsequent risk of kidney transplant failure.
A monthly roundup of research briefs showcasing recent scientific advances led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center faculty.
In the first such procedures in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University Medical Center has successfully used technology to bring two donor hearts that stopped beating back to life before transplanting them into patients.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) announces its most recent awards and appointments for the institution’s physicians, scientists, nurses, and staff.
Mount Sinai researchers have discovered a way to enhance the potency of blood-forming stem cells, potentially opening the door to a new approach for bone marrow transplantation.
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