Kidney Transplant Patients Seek Life Without Drugs With Experimental Immune System Procedure
Source: NYDailyNews.com
Lindsay Porter's kidneys were failing rapidly when a friend offered to donate one of his. Then she made an unusual request: would he donate part of his immune system, too? Every day for the rest of their lives, transplant recipients must swallow handfuls of pills to keep their bodies from rejecting a donated organ. The Chicago woman hope to avoid those problematic drugs, enrolling in a study to try to trick her own immune system into accepting a foreign kidney. Read More.

University of Maryland Doctors Perform Full Face Transplant
Source: The Baltimore Sun
The University of Maryland said on March 20 that it had completed a rare full face transplant on a 37-year-old man, including a double jaw and tongue. The 36-hour surgery was performed at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center by a team of doctors from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Read More.

UPMC Physicians Perform First Pancreatic Islet Transplant in Italy
Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Physicians at UPMC's hospital in Palermo, Italy have performed a pancreatic islet transplant for the first time, officials announced. The experimental procedure, which doctors are looking to do in Pittsburgh, aims to help people with Type 1 diabetes live without daily injections of insulin. In the surgery, insulin-producing cells are taken from a donor pancreas and transferred into another person. Read More.

Organ Donation Crusader Cherry-Picks Her Next Target
Source: The Toronto Star
Hélène Campbell has set her sights on a national scope to increase organ and tissue donation registration. This time she's going after Don Cherry and Hockey Night in Canada. Campbell, who suffers from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, came to the public's attention in January, shortly after being placed on the wait-list for a double lung transplant. The Ottawa woman, who now lives in Toronto to be close to Toronto General Hospital, had started an awareness campaign and got Justin Bieber to tweet his support. Donor registrations started climbing immediately, with 1,760 new registrations in Ontario the next week. Read More.

Bone Marrow Transplant Arrests Symptoms in Model of Rett Syndrome
Source: PR Newswire via The Wall Street Journal
A paper published online in Nature describes the results of using bone marrow transplant (BMT) to replace a faulty immune system cells in models of Rett Syndrome. The procedure arrested many sever symptoms of the childhood disorder, including abnormal breathing and movement, and significantly extended the lifespan of Rett mouse models. Exploring the function of microglia deficient in methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (Mecp2), the protein encoded by the "Rett gene" principle investigator Jonathan Kipnis, PhD and his team at the University of Virginia School of Medicine uncovered a completely novel approach to this devastating neurological syndrome. Read More.