Word: transplanter
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...patients in his tiny rural hospital outside Curitiba, in the south of Brazil. Many of them were dying of congestive heart failure, which caused their hearts to weaken and enlarge. Because he lacked the resources necessary for the standard American treatments for the disease--drug therapy and heart transplant--Batista needed to come up with a different solution. The one he finally adopted appears to be a relatively simple procedure, but it has shaken the world of cardiac surgery and offered new hope to people suffering from congestive heart failure. Batista's radical concept: Since the diseased heart...
Neither of the standard therapies for congestive heart failure--drugs and heart transplant--has proved particularly effective. Medications such as ace inhibitors keep the body's blood pressure down, making it easier for a weakened heart to circulate blood, but they do not fix the organ. In late-stage heart failure, the only option is a heart transplant. But while as many as 50,000 people in the U.S. alone need a heart transplant, only 2,500 transplants are performed there each year. Heart transplants have proved quite effective, with mortality rates of only 20% after a year...
McCarthy has been more cautious than Batista and more research oriented. He picks only patients who are healthy enough to be on the transplant list, so that if the procedure does not work they can be put on a left-ventricular assist device, or artificial pump, until a suitable donor can be found. "We've had a 72% success rate with the procedure," says McCarthy. "If you look at all the people who die just waiting for a heart transplant, those odds are pretty good...
...latter seeping through to the body, causing pressure to build in the lungs and stretching the lung tissue. In the U.S., the defect is usually closed up right away, but in the developing world children often grow up with the hole. Until now, the solution was a heart/lung transplant, which has a high mortality rate. Batista suggests constricting the pulmonary artery to restrict the amount of oxygenated blood flowing back into the lungs, thus enabling the lungs to relax and heal themselves. Again, he believes the body will operate well only if its organs are in proper proportion...
...into spheres, each the size of a coarsely ground speck of pepper. Gabrielian added several of these odd-looking constructs to a culture dish that also contained fetal RPE cells. Within 24 hours, the cells attached themselves to these motes of material and started to grow. Then the researchers transplanted the spheres into the eyes of rabbits, positioning them just beneath the retina. The RPE cells did not stay put; instead they migrated throughout the eye. This suggested that it should be possible to position a transplant at a safe distance from the macula and still get therapeutic results...