Editor's Note Researchers at Penn Medicine, Philadelphia, are conducting a clinical trial to test the effect of administering antiviral therapy to organ recipients after being transplanted with kidneys infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The first participant received a kidney transplant in July, and after being treated with Zepatier…

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Editor's Note Liver transplant candidates who are the sickest and should be first in line for a donor liver are increasingly being removed from the wait list because they are considered too sick to transplant, finds this study. Between 2007 and 2012, more than 4,300 patients were taken off the…

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Editor's Note In this meta-analysis, organ recipients who had cancer before receiving an organ transplant had higher rates of mortality and new cancers than organ recipients who had not had cancer. Organ recipients with previous cancers had a 1.5 times greater risk of dying from any cause, 3 times higher…

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Editor's Note Surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University hospitals will transplant kidneys from donors with hepatitis C virus (HCV) as part of a clinical trial this spring, STAT news reports. The recipients will be given a 12-week course of antiviral therapy after the transplant in hopes…

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Editor's Note Patients who underwent desensitization therapy and received kidney transplants from HLA-incompatible live donors had a substantial survival benefit, compared with patients who did not undergo transplantation or those who waited for transplants from deceased donors, this study finds. Researchers from Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, enrolled 1,025 patients at 22…

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Editor's Note Obtaining organs from deceased donors in a freestanding facility dedicated to organ recovery costs much less and leads to higher numbers of transplantable organs, this study finds. Researchers evaluated 6 years of data from the nation’s first freestanding organ recovery facility located in St Louis and owned and…

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Editor's Note A team of Cleveland Clinic surgeons on February 24 performed the nation’s first uterus transplant. The 9-hour procedure was performed on a 26-year old patient who had uterine factor infertility. The transplanted uterus came from a deceased organ donor. Further information will be released this week in a…

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Editor's Note Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, is the first and only center in the US to be approved by the United Network for Organ Sharing to perform HIV-positive to HIV-positive organ transplants. The hospital will be the first in the nation to do an HIV-positive to HIV-positive kidney transplant and…

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Editor's Note This 20-year study of more than 11,000 solid organ transplant patients found they had a 1.93 to 2.84 times higher risk of dying from cancer. The risk was highest for skin cancer, followed by non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and liver cancer. The administration of immunosuppressants or less aggressive cancer treatment…

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Editor's Note The Cleveland Clinic will perform uterus transplants in 10 women as part of a research study, the Washington Post reports. The candidates are women aged 21 to 39 who have uterine factor infertility. The procedure involves stimulation and freezing of multiple eggs, uterus donation from a deceased donor,…

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