By Kaitlyn Schaeffer
When stem cells were first discovered, their potential to alleviate suffering and cure disease was considered almost unbounded. However, their application to therapies has greatly outpaced research. Certain cancers are now treatable using stem cell-based techniques, but the vast majority of stem cell procedures are being conducted without any evidence that they are effective or safe.
Many years ago, physicians in Japan and South Korea created a “fat-based stem …

By Grace Kim
Approximately 21 people die a day from waiting for organs, and about 4,000 people are added to the national waiting list every month. The demand for organs is dramatically increasing, but the supply is increasingly diminishing.
A lab at Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Imaging in North Carolina offers a potential solution: Bioprinting. Bioprinting operates similarly to 3-D printing but the result of bioprinting is the opportunity to produce …

By Kaitlyn Schaeffer
Every year, thousands of people in the United States die waiting for organs. In an effort to inform legislation that might reduce the current organ shortage, researchers at several national universities undertook studies that examined whether certain circumstantial factors might influence people’s tendency to become an organ donor.
Judd Kessler from the University of Pennsylvania and Alvin Roth from Stanford analyzed data collected from California residents following a change …

By Grace Kim
In vitro fertilization, otherwise known as IVF, is a reproductive technology used as a means to help women get pregnant. As outlined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, IVF requires five basic steps. First, stimulation is required to boost ovulation in order to produce more than one egg. Then, the eggs are removed from the woman’s body. The eggs are then inseminated with sperm, leading to fertilization. …

By Caroline Song
A 59-year-old woman in the United Kingdom is making history: she is looking for a sperm donor to fertilize her deceased daughter’s eggs so that she can gestate her own grandchild.
Her daughter, known only as Ms. A, was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2005, and succumbed to the disease in 2011 at the age of 28. After receiving her diagnosis, Ms. A decided to have some of her …

By Kaitlyn Schaeffer
Many of the organ trafficking stories swirling around the web focus on supply; not much has been paid to demand.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) recently admonished the wealthy Europeans who have traveled to countries such as China, India, and Egypt in search of illegal organs. These MEPs say that Europeans who engage in such acts facilitate the organ trade, an illegal practice that involves many human rights …

By Richard Balagtas
“If you’re holding the ‘infected’ print edition in your hands right now, you’ll get into contact with HIV like never before…It will make you reflect on HIV and you will think differently afterward. Because now the issue is in your hands.” – Vangardist publisher and CEO, Julian Wiehl
If you were asked what exactly HIV was, would you know the answer? If you were asked how relevant HIV research …

By Rose Bowen
The pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson became the first in the drug industry to create a Bioethics panel of ethicists, doctors and patient advocates to respond to requests for access to experimental medicines, called “compassionate use.” This is only applicable to investigational drugs, or drugs that have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Arthur Caplan, Director of the NYU Division of Medical Ethics, …

By Michael Lausberg
Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero claims to have found a procedure to realize a project in transplant surgery that may strike us as something more fitting for a science fiction movie than today’s reality. He announced that a full body transplant could be possible in the next two years. In a full body transplant, the head of a living person would be transplanted to a donor cadaver’s body; such …

By Caroline Song
A 44-year-old male double-lung transplant patient at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, passed away following complications 40 days after his procedure.
His death was brought on by hyperammonemia, a state of incredibly high levels of ammonia in the blood. High levels of ammonia lead to brain swelling, which causes the patient to slip into a coma and expire soon after.
A new study has found that a type of …