On Friday, the United States is expected to pass 1 million solid-organ transplants since 1954. Most have been kidneys, followed by livers, hearts and lungs.
Doctors are testing transplanting pig parts as a possible alternative for patients seeking new organs.Richard Herrick, 23, was facing certain death in 1954 when his identical twin, Ronald, agreed to give him a kidney., but the idea was a fantasy. Richard's immune system, however, had no trouble accepting his brother's kidney, and he lived for eight years as the world's first successful organ transplant recipient.
Last year, for the first time, more than 40,000 solid organs – more than 100 a day – were transplanted. Still, more than 60,000 Americans on an organ transplant list were unable to get one last year because of limited supply. And many more never made the list, because they were considered too big a risk for the limited supply, either because of advanced age or prior behavior.
But the medications that keep people from rejecting organs also doom transplants as damage accumulates over time. , it's a huge burden for people who must keep taking the medication indefinitely. New laws will require government coverage as of January.About 15% Donors after circulatory death are generally younger and died from something other than heart failure, often opioid overdose, so their hearts are particularly healthy. Last year, 205 such hearts were used for transplant, and so far this year there have been188 transplants from donors after cardiac death, up from seven in 2019, according UNOS the organ sharing network.
Still, of all the hearts offered for transplant, only about one-third are used out of concern for their viability. Schroder helped prove the effectiveness of an approach that improves the quality of donated hearts and allows them to last longer.Surgeons get concerned about the heart if it is preserved on ice for more than four hours, Schroder said.
Geography also can create inequities, he said. Because organs can travel only so far,"I'm sure there are some disparities," with people in remote rural areas having less access to organs than those in major cities. Overall, though, the organ donation rate is relatively consistent across the country, he said.
Increasing transplants and transplant equity, Massa said, still depends on having"more people say yes." So in 2019, Kruz got a bone marrow transplant from his mother and then one of her kidneys. Two years ago, his sister got the same from their father. A third, unrelated child also received a double donation. None of the children need immunosuppressive medication, and there's no obvious expiration date on their new organs.
David Sachs, a transplant researcher at Columbia University in New York and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said the procedures confirm the potential of using donor cells to eventually move away from organ-damaging medications. Sachs, 80, has been working most of his life to increase organ supply and reduce the need for immunosuppressive medication.
Sachs, who splits his research time between Columbia University and Massachusetts General Hospital, has long been working toward the possibility of xenotransplantation, using animal organs in people. In 2005, he oversaw the first gene edits to a pig to make its organs less likely to be rejected by a human.For several decades, he has thought the field was on the verge of clinical trials – which still haven't started.
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