Transplants/Organ Donations
Latest articles on Transplants/Organ Donations
Christopher N. Bredeson, MD, MSc, FRCPC, describes advances in bone marrow transplant techniques that have reduced side effects and allowed more people with leukemia to keep their disease under control.
Harry T. Whelan, MD, Medical College of Wisconsin Professor of Neurology and Director of Hyperbaric Medicine, is incorporating NASA technology into cancer treatments and therapies.
"The most common cause of liver cancer worldwide is chronic hepatitis B infection," says Dr. Kia Saeian, Associate Professor of Medicine and and Director of the Froedtert & Medical College Hepatitis Treatment Program.
Researchers found that captopril, given after patients receive irradiation to prepare for bone marrow transplants, showed a favorable trend for better kidney function and long-term survival.
The gift will allow the College's MACC Fund-supported investigators to expand preclinical programs on tumor vaccine development and apply their findings to childhood cancers.
"The Outcomes Database will provide physicians, scientists, policy makers and patients with the information they need to make the best possible clinical decisions and to advance the field," says Mary Horowitz, MD.
With the growing sophistication of doctors in overcoming the tendency for transplant rejection, the success of liver transplants is now remarkably "over 95% at one year," says Jose Franco, MD.
The delicate art of transplanting body tissues is becoming a commonplace procedure, says Donald A. Hackbarth Jr., MD. In almost all cases, the tissue donors are recently-deceased adults who have signed consent forms.
The medical profession continues to improve the process of kidney transplantation, resulting in a high rate of success and providing hundreds of thousands with new hope, says Mark Adams, MD, MS. Yet there are a limited number of kidneys available.
Patients with scleroderma need care from multiple experts. M. E. Csuka, MD, discusses her work with this uncommon, sometimes fatal rheumatologic disorder.
Using a newly developed procedure with refined technology and tools, Steven B. Koenig, MD, regularly accomplishes corneal transplants that replace only the back layer of the cornea while leaving the remainder essentially untouched.
Replacing insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas can now be done in two ways, through a whole pancreas transplant or through a less invasive and less costly process of injecting just the islet cells.
Transplantation of cord blood - normally discarded after a baby's birth - provides leukemia patients with stem cells, enabling them to produce healthy blood cells in a procedure shown to be highly effective in children with the disease.
To improve transplant access and outcomes for patients, the National Marrow Donor Program and MCW's International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry and Autologous Blood and Marrow Transplant Registry created the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research.
The Medical College has been at the forefront of research in the use of gallium nitrate to treat lymphoma. "In the future, we intend to combine gallium nitrate with other chemotherapeutic drugs in the hope that this will improve the results of treatment and increase the cure rate in this disease," says Principal Investigator Christopher Chitambar, MD.
"Graft-vs-host disease is like a whole-body immune response against the marrow recipient," says Robert L. Truitt, PhD. If left unchecked, this complication is debilitating at best and lethal at its worst. The good news is that we can control it now."
Dr. Richard Roman, an expert in the field of kidney disease, is the Director of MCW's Kidney Disease Center. "I didn't think that it was possible to reverse kidney disease," he says, "but with newly emerging technologies I strongly believe that there is new hope."
By transplanting stem cells directly onto the cornea, Dr. E. Lee Stock is breaking new ground in treating eyes damaged by injury or disease. Only select candidates can benefit at this point, but the difference the procedure can make in their lives can be profound.
In people with sickle cell anemia, red blood cells become stiff and form a half-circle, or "sickle" shape that can't squeeze through small blood vessels. Instead, they stack up and stop the oxygen-carrying blood from reaching organs and tissues.
One area of study for researchers in the sickle cell program at the Blood Research Institute is pulmonary hypertension, a condition that affects nearly one third of adults with sickle cell disease.
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