Aug. 10 - Doris Taylor is a scientist working in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Her work has focused on creating personalized functioning human hearts in a lab that could rule out the need for donors. Taylor has dubbed these hearts “ghost hearts.” In March, Taylor spoke at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference in Naples, Florida, about the ghost heart and her journey to creating it. Below are edited answers to questions from The Conversation. Taylor is also featured on Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People podcast.

Aug. 9 - A recent study by King et al. reported that transplant centers frequently skip candidates with the highest priority on the transplant waitlist. This finding could send a message of violation of the transplant waitlist concept, undermining trust in the system. Kidney Donor Profile Index (KDPI) is used as a measure of organ quality and Estimated Post Transplant Survival (EPTS) is used as a measure of recipient longevity in the study. However, these indices are only moderately accurate with c-statistics of 0.60 for KDPI and 0.69 for EPTS.

Aug. 7 - The Catholic University of Korea Eunpyeong St. Mary's Hospital said it successfully performed the first robotic kidney transplantation from a brain-dead donor for the first time in Korea.

July 17 - The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a technique that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make around 70 edits to a pig’s genome. These edits should allow the organs to be successfully transplanted into people, the team says. As soon as next year, eGenesis hopes to transplant pig hearts into babies with serious heart defects. The goal is to buy them more time to wait for a human heart.

Aug. 10 - The story begins in 2015, when gastroenterologist Chiou Fang Kuan, MBBS, at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital and Jeyaraj Prema Raj, MBBS, director of SingHealth Duke-NUS Transplant Centre, recognized a need to develop an intestinal transplant scheme. The Singapore doctors also connected with Debra Sudan, MD, professor of surgery and pediatrics at Duke, while she was presenting cases at a conference in Hong Kong. Finally, in March of 2022 — after more than 10 rehearsal surgeries and approvals from the Singapore Ministry of Health — the team felt ready to attempt transplants.

Aug. 10 - Malek Kamoun of the Perelman School of Medicine and Ryan Urbanowicz of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center are developing machine learning strategies to improve kidney matching and decrease the risk of graft failure—with help from Penn students. Through the PURM internship program, undergraduate students are further researching an algorithm developed to group kidney donor-recipient pairs into low-risk and high-risk groups for graft survival.

Aug. 10 - When Congress created the OPTN by passing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, they included a requirement that only nonprofit groups may lead it under contract with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). This was based on government-sponsored research performed by a team of experienced surgeons, scientists, lawyers and ethicists. Their reasoning, which is even more valid today than it was in the 1980s, was that we cannot have a truly equitable transplant system if profits are allowed to be a motivating factor in the OPTN’s work. Sure enough, today the OPTN’s organ matching, policymaking and other responsibilities are guided by whether they would help the sickest, most medically urgent patients.

Aug. 10 - The Director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, said the hospital will start performing kidney transplant operations by the end of the year. The news came during a press tour of the newly renovated emergency department, which cost $1 million. Abu Salmiya explained that the only obstacle to performing the kidney transplant operation is finding the matching tissues which requires conducting analyses in the West Bank and Israel which takes time. He explained that the hospital's emergency department used to receive about 700-900 cases per day, "but today it receives more than 1,200 cases", while the number of daily surgeries has increased from 80 to 120

Aug. 10 - The PPD clinical research business of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., has been granted a five-year award to provide a Transplantation Statistical and Clinical Coordinating Center for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. This center will offer a broad range of support services critical to the design, development, execution and analysis of NIAID transplantation clinical trials and research.

Aug. 10 - The genetic condition, called situs inversus, affects about 1 in every 10,000 people, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Occurring during fetal development, the disorder has been linked to some 100 different genes.

Aug. 5 - Though chimeric antigen receptor T cells are showing promise in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, challenges, including those related to manufacture, those that are patient/disease specific, and those regarding risk mitigation, remain a struggle.

Aug. 10 - The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the extended use of Prevymis® (letermovir) from 100 to 200 days post-transplant for the prophylaxis of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and disease in adult CMV-seropositive recipients of an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) who are at risk for late CMV infection and disease.

Aug. 4 - In adults who have had liver transplantation surgery, prostaglandins may reduce death from any cause, up to one month after surgery, compared with placebo (sham treatment) or standard care. Prostaglandins may result in a large reduction in the development of acute kidney failure requiring dialysis.

Aug. 2 - With an intravenous immunoglobulin-based treatment protocol, individuals who underwent renal transplantation and who were presensitized achieved intermediate-term graft and recipient survival results at 98%.

Aug. 2 - A new therapeutic option is under study for use in a difficult-to-treat subset of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), according to a presentation during the European Hematology Association (EHA) 2023 Hybrid Congress. Exploratory results of the phase III MORPHO trial showed a benefit to the FLT3 inhibitor gilteritinib vs placebo as maintenance therapy after transplantation for patients with FLT3-ITD–mutated AML, especially those with detectable measurable residual disease (MRD).

Aug. 2 - UCLA-led research describes the role that a protein called CEACAM1 plays in protecting the liver from injury during the transplantation process, potentially improving transplant outcomes. But the features that regulate this protective characteristic remain unknown. In a new study, published online in Science Translational Medicine, a research team has identified the molecular factors at the root of this protection and shown how using molecular tools and alternative gene splicing can make CEACAM1 more protective, thus reducing organ injury and ultimately improving post-transplant outcomes.

Aug. 3 - Allogeneic islet transplantation is a validated treatment for type 1 diabetes; however, transplanted islet graft function declines over time for unknown reasons. Researchers investigated the relationship between primary graft function (PGF) and 5-year islet transplantation outcomes. In this retrospective, multicenter, observational cohort study, researchers enrolled all patients from the Collaborative Islet Transplant Registry who received islet transplantation alone (ITA recipients) or islet-after-kidney transplantation (IAK recipients) between January 19, 1999, and July 17, 2020, and had a calculable PGF (exposure of interest) measured 28 days after the last islet infusion using a validated composite index of islet graft function (BETA-2 score).