Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore say they have successfully removed a donated kidney through a woman’s belly button. The university says the location of the incision means the 22-year-old Virginia woman who donated the kidney April 15 will not have a scar from the surgery. The kidney was given to [Sign in to read the full article...]

South Korean scientists said they have cloned a piglet whose organs were genetically modified to make them more suitable for human transplants, according to a report from Agence France Presse. Lead scientist Lim Gio-Bin said the piglet, born April 3, had been genetically altered to lack the “alpha-gal” gene that triggers tissue rejection. He said [Sign in to read the full article...]

Bedside manner and timing are important when asking relatives to consent to donate the organs of a loved one who is brain dead, researchers reported in last week’s British Medical Journal. Researchers in the U.K. analyzed 20 previous studies to identify the key factors in whether relatives consented to organ donation. Currently, UK physicians do [Sign in to read the full article...]

Having both lungs replaced instead of just one is the single most important feature determining who lives longest after having a lung transplant, more than doubling an organ recipient’s chances of extending their life by over a decade, a study by a team of Johns Hopkins transplant surgeons shows. “Our results suggest that double-lung transplants [Sign in to read the full article...]

Kidney failure patients’ skin cells can successfully be used to grow tissue-engineered shunts for dialysis, researchers reported in the April 25 issue of The Lancet. About half of all dialysis patients have their blood filtered three times a week via a plastic tube that creates a shunt — a connection between the patient’s arteries and [Sign in to read the full article...]