transplant

With more patients needing heart transplants than there are hearts available, a tiny heart pump called a ventricular assist device (VAD) can be a lifesaver. But the pump, which is inserted into the aorta via a catheter that helps blood flow, requires wiring leads that run out of the patient's body to a battery pack, and this setup can easily result in infection.

So a team of computer and electrical engineering students at Rice University have devised a method to power the VAD without wires breaking through the skin.

The team used a small coil and a battery inserted … Read more

The pancreatic cancer that killed Steve Jobs was discovered in 2004 when he was being checked for kidney stones. Biographer Walter Isaacson tells Steve Kroft that Jobs postponed a potentially life-saving operation--a decision he later regretted.

In early 2009, Steve Jobs was "wasting away" in desperate need of a liver transplant, his biographer Walter Isaacson tells Steve Kroft. Jobs finally had the surgery in Memphis, and it was done in great secrecy--much like the development of a new Apple product.

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have designed an artificial lung that uses air instead of pure oxygen as a ventilating gas--an advance that could turn accompanying oxygen cylinders into relics of the past.

What's more, the device for use in humans could come in at just 6x6x4 inches, which is roughly the volume of the real human lung, meaning it could conceivably pave the way for implantable artificial lungs.

"Current technology involves complex systems that are limited to intensive care units, so [the] device has the potential to provide clinically relevant oxygenation levels using ambient air, opening the door to portable systems," says Jeffrey Borenstein, an expert in microsystems technology and biomedical devices at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., in a news release.

Joseph Potkay, an electrical engineering and computer science professor and the lead author of the paper describing the lung, estimates that based on current performance the unit could be powered by the heart instead of a mechanical pump.… Read more

Apple is once again being asked to discuss what the company would do without CEO Steve Jobs.

Apple said today in regulatory filings that it was informed that Central Laborers' Pension Fund, which owns over 11,000 shares of Apple stock, plans to submit a proposal at Apple's annual shareholder's meeting on February 23, that if passed would require Apple to "adopt and disclose a written and detailed succession planning policy."

Apple's board of directors said in the filings that it has recommended shareholders vote against the proposal. They say they have already established a … Read more

The concept of swallowing microchip-embedded pills that are activated by stomach acid to transmit data isn't entirely new. But it could go from concept to market quite quickly, predicts Swiss firm Novartis.

In January, Novartis committed to spending $24 million on the smart pill technology developed by Redwood, Calif.-based Proteus Biomedical. This week, the company projects that it will seek regulatory approval--at least in Europe--within 18 months.

"We hope within the next 18 months to have something that we will be able to submit to the regulators," global head of development Trevor Mundel told the … Read more

Let's just say it's a good thing this breakthrough didn't come around when I was in my early twenties, or I may have been tempted to spend a little more time at my favorite neighborhood watering hole.

Scientists at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center say they've successfully used human liver cells to create miniature livers that function like their larger, more naturally derived counterparts.

Using a process called decellularization, the team rinsed real livers from an unspecified animal with detergent, stripping them of all their cells and leaving only … Read more

Bioengineered organs, still largely the stuff of sci-fi, may have just moved a step closer to reality with reports that scientists have successfully implanted lab-made lung tissue into living rats.

The fully functional tissue can exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, the key role of the lungs.

The scientists--led by a team at Yale University--used a chemical treatment to remove all existing cells from adult rat lungs, keeping the structure of the airways and vascular system intact to later serve as a sort of "scaffold" for the growth of new lung cells.

They then cultured a combination of lung cells using a bioreactor designed to mimic the fetal lung environment and repopulated the "decellularized" rat lung with the engineered cells. When implanted into rats for short intervals of 45 to 120 minutes, the new tissue exchanged gas in a manner similar to that of natural lungs.

The scientists, who detail their work in a Thursday issue of the journal Science, acknowledge that it may be some time before scientists can generate fully functional lungs in vitro, but they nonetheless are touting their research as a promising development in the quest to regenerate lung tissue.

"This is an early step in the regeneration of entire lungs for larger animals and, eventually, for humans," said Laura Niklason, a Yale professor and vice chair of the Departments of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering and lead author of the study, which was funded by Yale and the National Institutes of Health. (Decellularization has also been used in experiments to rebuild a human heart). … Read more

For nearly two years, 43-year-old Charles Okeke has tried to live a normal life in the hospital tethered to a 400-pound machine.

"It sort of overwhelms you to think, 'I'm stuck to a machine,'" he says.

Okeke was barely 30 when a blood clot destroyed his heart, reports CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton. He had a transplant and for 10 years, life was good for this computer consultant and father of three.

But in 2008 his body rejected that heart and at that time another transplant was out of the question.

Okeke now has what … Read more

A myocardial infarction, most commonly referred to as a heart attack, occurs when blood supply to the heart is blocked. For those who survive, permanent tissue damage is likely; during the blockage cells are literally starved to death, and do not grow back, leaving the heart forever weakened.

If only there was a way to heal a broken heart, instead of having to get an entirely new one, or undergoing a tricky bypass graft.

Enter the cardiac patch, which is essentially a tissue transplant instead of a full-on heart transplant. Using immature heart cells in newborn rats, researchers have found … Read more