It’s not too late for transplant administrators, transplant surgeons, hospital administrators, and insurance company executives to register for the December 4 Transplant Communications Webinar/Audioconference on “The CMS Interpretive Guidelines for transplant centers COPs: What centers waiting to be audited need to know; why centers that have already been audited must remain vigilant.” During the audioconference, [Sign in to read the full article...]

In a feat of biomedical engineering, doctors in London have given a woman from Spain a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs. Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done. If successful, the procedure could become a new standard of treatment, [Sign in to read the full article...]

An American teenager survived for nearly four months without a heart, kept alive by a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device, until she was able to have a heart transplant, Reuters reports. The patient, 14-year-old D’Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the experience of living for so long with a machine pumping her blood was scary: “You [Sign in to read the full article...]

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration in the San Francisco Bay Area, transplant surgeons from Stanford Hospital and California Pacific Medical Center joined specialists from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in a set of carefully orchestrated kidney transplant operations that started on the morning of Nov. 19. First, the surgeons [Sign in to read the full article...]

California laws that are aimed at putting the state at the global forefront of stem cell science are stymieing a promising avenue of research by creating a shortage of human eggs, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. The state’s $3 billion taxpayer initiative to fund stem cell research prohibits paying women to be egg donors. But [Sign in to read the full article...]