Believe it or not, there is still time to register for Transplant Communications’ July 29 webinar/audioconference, “The Benefits and Challenges of Transplanting the Highly Sensitized Kidney Patient: Issues surrounding patient management, reimbursement and outcomes.” Topics to be discussed include managing and transplanting highly sensitized kidney patients, improving survival rates among conventional transplant patients, and treatment [Sign in to read the full article...]

In an alleged decade-long scheme exposed by an FBI sting last week, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, N.Y., had been brokering the sale of black-market kidneys, buying organs from vulnerable people from Israel for $10,000 and selling them to desperate patients in the U.S. for as much as $160,000, the Associated Press reports. Rosenbaum, 58, [Sign in to read the full article...]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that it will require manufacturers of some immunosuppressant drugs used in kidney transplantation to update their labeling to reflect an increased risk of infections, Medical News Today reports. The required label changes affect the following drugs used to help prevent rejection of transplanted organs: – Rapamune (sirolimus) – [Sign in to read the full article...]

The recipient of the world’s first complete double arm transplant scratched his head and back and beamed at his doctors last week, saying he was on the path to independence a year after the pioneering operation, according to the Associated Press. Farmer Karl Merk, 55, who lost his arms just below the shoulder in a [Sign in to read the full article...]

Chinese researchers said last week that they had created healthy mice from reprogrammed skin cells, according to a report from Agence France-Presse. Mice created from the newly-made “pluripotent” cells went on to have babies, the first of which has been called Xiao Xiao, or Tiny, they said. In a study published by the British journal [Sign in to read the full article...]