Saturday, 7 September, 2024 —
transplant
Aria Bendix reporting for NBC:
…two months later, Bennett Sr.’s body rejected the heart and he died at age 57. In a paper, his doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center explained that his body had likely produced too many antibodies that fought off the new organ. A drug he’d been given may also have increased the odds of rejection, and a virus in the pig heart further complicated matters.
Three other patients have followed in Bennett Sr.’s footsteps and received pig organs, most recently a pig kidney transplant in April. Together, they represent the pioneer patients of the burgeoning field of xenotransplantation. For their families, three of which spoke to NBC News about the experience, the journey came with a roller coaster of emotions, from uncertainty to blind hope — and, ultimately, admiration for their loved one’s decision.
…
None of the patients survived more than three months. To the public, that might seem like failure. But to the families, the transplants accomplished their goals: to buy their loved ones more time and advance research that could potentially save lives one day.
This includes Rick Slayman, whose transplant I linked to earlier news items (one, two), although Slayman’s family did not contribute to Bendix’s reporting.
Xenotransplantation, in this case, pig hearts and pig kidneys, is an amazing scientific breakthrough. These transplant families have been through a lot and, it is amazing to me how supportive they are of their loved ones living a little bit longer — days or weeks — to move the medical science forward.
As ever, the defining need is more available donors to help wait list patients. It’s a hard story when health declines so much, in part because tranplant wait times can be so long for suitable matches, particularly for heart and lung transplants, that someone who needs a transplant would no longer qualify medically to receive one.
My hope is over the next few decades there are multiple improvements that allow improved xenotransplantation, cloned human organs, an increase in deceased donor donation viability, and, plainly, more folks willing to donate altruistically while living for kidney or part of their liver. Alongside that, better medical advances to reduce the need for transplants altogether, less terrible and more effective forms of dialysis. May progress continue.
Thursday, 18 April, 2024 —
tech
Sean Hollister:
In 2020, we wrote how coding bootcamp Lambda School seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Four years later and one rebranding to “BloomTech” later, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finally slapping it on the wrist – it’s permanently banning it from issuing any more student loans, fining the company and its CEO $164,000, and releasing some students from some of their debt.
Why? Among other deceptive practices, the “Bloom Institute of Technology” didn’t call them loans. It advertised a way for students to get high-paying tech jobs “risk free” with “no loans” by paying 17 percent of their future income for five years – rather than the $20,000 sticker price of tuition.
But those Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs) were definitely loans, the CFPB has decided, since Bloom was earning an average finance charge of $4,000 on each one, students could default and get sent to collections if they failed to make payments, and Bloom was turning around and selling those student debts to investors for $7,000 to $10,000 a pop.
What a reckless and abusive business model. I’ve worked with several fantastic software engineers that came out of code schools. The practical focus of these programs is incredibly beneficial, but there’s zero reason a program like this has to be run as a for-profit endeavor as opposed to being a certificate program administered through community colleges.
Monday, 8 April, 2024 —
photography
Mostly cloudy solar eclipse at 91 percent coverage
Here in Williams Township, Penn., we had a maximum of 91 percent coverage from today’s North American total solar eclipse. We’d held onto eclipse glasses we picked up in Montréal, Québec in 2012, where we were present for a clouded-over Transit of Venus. The morning started off sunny, but around 1 PM, clouds started moving in. By the time the eclipse started here, it was iffy that we’d be able to see anything. So, we were feeling a bit of cosmic frustration.
Thankfully, at 3 PM, we were able to see the eclipse through some gaps in the clouds. I’d still love to see totality in my life, but I’m pretty pleased at how some photos in the front yard turned out. The benefit of the heavy cloud cover is it rendered the eclipse visible through the clouds and, therefore, able to be photographed easily without filters.
Tuesday, 2 April, 2024 —
transplant
Dylan Matthews, writing for Vox
But the Mass General researchers went a step further when they transplanted a pigney into Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old Weymouth, Massachusetts, man who was very much alive. He luckily remains alive as of this writing and is producing urine through the piece of pork that some doctors put in him.
This is unquestionably good news for Slayman, and while routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options.
We shouldn’t let the news distract us, however, from an uncomfortable fact: Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends.
All of this.
Thursday, 21 March, 2024 —
transplant
Rob Stein reporting for NPR:
For the first time, surgeons have transplanted a kidney from a genetically modified pig into a living person, doctors in Boston said Thursday.
Richard Slayman, 62, of Weymouth, Mass., who is suffering from end-stage kidney disease, received the organ Saturday in a four-hour procedure, Massachusetts General Hospital announced. He is recovering well and is expected to be discharged Saturday, the hospital said.
Unless kidney transplant candidates have a living donor, there is typically a years-long backlog for a deceased-donor kidney. As in Slayman’s case, it is possible for a first transplanted kidney to also fail and require a return to dialysis and a second, or sometimes third donor kidney.
The medical science to allow for transplantation of a kidney from genetically modified pigs is a hoped for way to ameliorate the backlog. Closing the gap also potentially means that more people could potentially qualify for transplant.
End-stage renal disease is 3.8 times more common among Black people than white people in the U.S., according to federal statistics.
The transplant “represents a potential breakthrough in solving one of the more intractable problems in our field, that being unequal access for ethnic minority patients to the opportunity for kidney transplants due to the extreme donor organ shortage and other system-based barriers,” said Dr. Winfred Williams, the kidney specialist treating Slayman, who is a Black man.
First and foremost, I wish every kidney transplant candidate could and would match with a living donor. Second, I wish everyone able and willing to designate themselves a posthumous organ donor would do so. Third, I hope for animal organs to be made available thoughtfully and safely, and with the welfare of the animals raised to be donors provided for at the highest level of care.