By Kaitlyn Schaeffer Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have made a breakthrough for regenerative medicine. One of the most serious problems associated with getting artificial kidneys to function in the body of a recipient is the tendency of the recipient's blood vessels to close, preventing the transplanted organ from receiving blood. The scientists, using human-sized pig kidneys, have [...]
By Andrew Rock A severe shortage of organs for transplant in Australia has led to a bizarre and ethically questionable phenomenon: doctors have begun harvesting organs from diseased patients in the “upper age limit,” those 80 and over. The shortage is the result of two main causes. Australia has one of the highest rates of [...]
By Andrew Rock The World Health Organization estimates that current organ supply meets only a tenth of its need. This persistent shortage has led many people to search for organs elsewhere, resulting in a thriving black market. Desperate individuals who turn to the global marketplace usually enlist the services of a broker; brokers often charge [...]
By Kaitlyn Schaeffer A recent article in The New York Times has alerted the public to the enormous gap between supply and demand for organs worldwide. Reporter Kevin Sack revealed that not only are thousands of people participating in the global organ black market, they are also paying exorbitant sums to get their hands on [...]
By Asha Prasad In a pilot study conducted at Imperial College London, five patients underwent an experimental treatment for stroke that utilized the participants’ own stem cells. To create the therapy, researchers extracted CD34+ cells, the set of stem cells in bone marrow that create blood cells and blood vessel lining cells, and injected them [...]
By Asha Prasad In many countries around the world, religious principles sometimes clash with scientific advancement. Spiritual concerns often keep people from donating organs, and sometimes from receiving them. This is not the case in India, however, contrary to what many believe. An article that outlines what different religions have to say about organ donation [...]
By Kaitlyn Schaeffer Every year in the United States, 4,000 people die waiting for a kidney. Worldwide, the discrepancy between supply and demand is similarly dismal: the World Health Organization estimates that only about 10% of the need for kidneys is supplied by the current availability of organs. Despite its illegality in most countries, there [...]
By Kaitlyn Schaeffer Three thousand people in the United States are currently on the waiting list for a heart transplant. Unfortunately, only about 2,000 donor hearts become available every year. Those patients awaiting transplants must instead rely on machines to circulate their blood for them, devices that put them at risk for blood clots, internal [...]
By Jake Stern Scientists from Imperial College London are testing an injection that could, in the future, replace heart transplants and other cardiac surgery. The subjects of the study are two dozen patients at Harefield hospital in the United Kingdom with serious heart failure and fitted with mechanical pumps. The gene therapy involves injecting a [...]
By Chiru Murage There is a call for the Ministry of Health to establish protocols preventing the sale of Iranian kidneys to foreign patients. The Ministry, however, blames society for this problem. Doctors in Iran are thousands of dollars to carry out transplants on patients that come with fake documents to the country in search [...]
