Image copyright J. Nichols, Science Translational Medicine 2018 Image caption The engineered pig lung is shown here in its bioreactor

Scientists have successfully transplanted a bioengineered lung into a pig.

To create a new lung, experts used a "scaffold" that provided structural support and slowly built up the lung tissue around it, using cells from the pig that was due to get the transplant.

This was done to prevent the lung being rejected by the pig's immune system.

Once transplanted, the lung alveolar tissue and blood vessels carried on developing for up to two months.

Not only was the lung not rejected, but it even developed an important population of bacteria.

Lungs suitable for transplant are in short supply and the study is a significant step forward in finding an alternative solution. "People wait for a long time on a transplant list before they are able to receive a donated lung," said co-author Professor Joan Nichols.

The transplantation of bioengineered lungs has been tried before in small animals, but these efforts have met with failure. There were problems with the blood vessels and the animals suffered from an accumulation of fluid, known as oedema.

"We were able to make a much better developed vasculature in the lungs... and transplant into a larger animal with a larger lung," said co-author Prof Joaquin Cortiella, from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, US.

How did they do it?

Investigators used a cocktail of sugar and detergent to get rid of all the cells and blood vessels from a lung taken from a donor pig. This left behind a support scaffold made from proteins - the lung's "skeleton" if you like.

Then, they regenerated the lung over 30 days in a piece of equipment called a bioreactor, using cells from the eventual recipient of the lung. A bioreactor is a machine that supports the development of biological tissue. If the recipient animal's cells are used, it reduces the likelihood that the pig's immune system will reject a transplanted organ because it recognises the tissue as its own.

The key to the UTMB team's success in getting the lung's blood vessel development started in the bioreactor was supplying stem cells (the body's "master cells" that are able to subsequently develop into different tissue types), but also growth factors - a molecule that stimulates cell growth, proliferation or the differentiation of cells into different types.

Image copyright J. Nichols

After transplantation, they used CT (Computed Tomography) and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanning and measurement of gene expression to check that lung tissue and vessel growth was continuing. And they didn't need to keep adding growth factors to make this growth happen.

Prof John Hunt, from Nottingham Trent University, said: "The bioengineered lung facilitates the development of a blood supply and provides for the establishment of natural lung microbial flora."

Importantly, the transplanted lung wasn't rejected at the end of the two-month study. After transplant, the pig's blood remained fully saturated with oxygen although, "the one thing we couldn't really evaluate was how much the bioengineered lung provided oxygenation to the animal" said Prof Nichols. "The lungs weren't really mature enough at two months."

The technique has been successful in four pigs so far. "Given the complexity of the model, the authors should be congratulated on their approach and success to date" says Prof Hunt.

When are artificial lungs needed?

There are a range of conditions that may result in a lung transplant being carried out, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cystic fibrosis, pulmonary hypertension and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The demand for lungs for transplant is immense and the supply just doesn't match it, so it is often the last course of treatment action.

"We could make a more standardised product that would work much better," said Prof Nichols. This new procedure could eventually help people suffering from quite serious lung diseases.

"We could take cells from people and produce an organ tissue matched to them, with no immuno-suppression needed," she explained.

How far away is this from use in humans?

This advance in bioengineered lungs could increase the number of transplants - and make the transplant better. "We don't fit donated lungs very well to how big an individual is... bioengineered lungs can be made at any time, so patients don't have to wait until an organ is available," Joaquin Cortiella said.

"I would say somewhere around 5-10 years you will see someone actually get a bioengineered lung," he continued. The work described in their paper is a standard part of pre-clinical testing. With enough funding, growing lungs to transplant into people in compassionate-use circumstances could become a reality.

But there are some tricky challenges still to overcome: "What we really need are bioreactors that will support the development of tissues properly," said Joan Nichols.

"It's fantastic - it looks great up to two months, because without getting to two months, there will be no longer term studies, said Prof Hunt. He added that the result was "a wonderful result and motivator that we're working on the right things and heading in the right direction".

Follow Lucy on Twitter. </s> For the first time ever, lungs grown in a lab have been successfully transplanted into pigs, allowing them to breathe normally with no medical complications. The breakthrough achievement opens up the possibility of using similarly bioengineered lungs for humans in need of a lung transplant.

“This is the first time someone has transplanted a whole bioengineered organ,” Joan Nichols, associate director of the Galveston National Laboratory at University of Texas Medical Branch, told Digital Trends. “We also demonstrate amazing tissue growth and development of the vascular system. There was no infection, no rejection of tissues, and animals tolerated the bioengineered lung transplant very well.”

To make the lab-grown lungs, the researchers first created a scaffold which came from an unrelated donor pig. They achieved this using a process in which all cells and blood are removed from the organ, leaving just a skeleton. Next, the researchers removed a single lung from a pig as the cell source to produce a bioengineered tissue-matched lung for transfer. This was treated with growth factor-filled hydrogels and nanoparticles to prepare the scaffold for the addition of cells, which came from a single lung taken from each of the “patient” pigs 30 days before the operation. The finished bioengineered lung — featuring cells from the patient — was then transplanted into the pigs.

Six bioengineered lungs were created in total, although only four animals were capable of receiving them due to surgical issues.

“The lungs continued to grow and develop in each animal’s body,” Nichols said. “The growth factors help the cells to survive, and also help us make sure that when we add each type of cell — vascular or blood vessel or lung-specific cell — onto the scaffold that the cells stay where we need them to be.”

Previous work by the team has shown that it is possible to produce a pediatric-sized lung which could be used in human patients. To get to the point of clinical trials, Nichols estimated an additional five to eight years of preclinical testing is needed. Once this is complete, however, the results could be a game-changer in terms of ending organ transplant waiting lists.

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. </s> People waiting for lung transplants could soon be the recipients of lab-grown organs.

In a milestone study, researchers have successfully transplanted lungs bioengineered into living pigs.

The breakthrough paves the way for growing lungs to transplant into human patients, within as little as five years.

The research team at University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) were the first to successfully grow human lungs in a lab in 2014, and their new research marks the next step.

"The number of people who have developed severe lung injuries has increased worldwide, while the number of available transplantable organs have decreased," said Joaquin Cortiella, professor of pediatric anesthesia at UTMB.

Joan Nichols, professor of internal medicine and associate director of the Galveston National Laboratory at UTMB added: "Our ultimate goal is to eventually provide new options for the many people awaiting a transplant."

In order to produce a bionengineered lung, a support scaffold is needed that meets the structural needs of a lung.

To create this, the researchers used a lung from an unrelated animal that was treated with a special cocktail of sugar and detergent. This eliminated the cells and blood in the lung, leaving just a lung-shaped scaffold of proteins behind.

The researchers used cells from a single lung removed from each of the pigs in the study to create tissue-matched lungs for them.

After the lung scaffolds were placed in a tank with a mixture of nutrients and the animals' own cells, the bioengineered lungs were grown in a bioreactor for 30 days before the transplants took place.

All of the pigs that received one of the lab-grown lungs stayed healthy.

"The bioengineered lungs continued to develop post-transplant without any infusions of growth factors, the body provided all of the building blocks that the new lungs needed," said Nichols and Cortiella.

However, even after two months, "the bioengineered lung was not yet mature enough for us to stop the animal from breathing on the normal lung and switch to just the bioengineered lung,” said Cortiella.

That's why the next step, said the researchers, is to explore long-term survival and maturation of the tissues as well as their gas exchange capability.

They hope that they will be able to grow lungs to transplant into humans within five to ten years.

"It has taken a lot of heart and 15 years of research to get us this far, our team has done something incredible with a ridiculously small budget and an amazingly dedicated group of people," said Nichols and Cortiella.

The research was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. </s> STAINES-UPON-THAMES, United Kingdom, Aug. 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mallinckrodt plc (NYSE: MNK), a leading global specialty pharmaceutical company, today announced it has initiated a company-sponsored, experimental, proof-of-concept study of nitric oxide gas with ex-vivo lung perfusion compared to lung perfusion alone in human lung transplants. The study has enrolled its first set of lungs, and the actual lungs to be evaluated are being assigned for research use, not for human lung transplantation.

The study's primary objectives are to assess the effects of nitric oxide in perfused ex-vivo lungs using a proprietary grading system and to evaluate the total ex-vivo perfusion time of the lungs through periodic assessments during Ex-Vivo Lung Perfusion (EVLP).

EVLP describes a process of evaluating and preparing donor lungs outside the body; nutrients are perfused, or circulated, through the organ, and the organ is ventilated to mimic physiologic function prior to transplant surgery. EVLP has the potential to increase the available donor pool through restoring and repairing donor lungs.1

"Mallinckrodt is focused on providing treatment options for the unmet needs of and to improve outcomes for patients with severe and critical conditions. The company has more than 20 years of experience with and investment in nitric oxide as a signaling molecule," said Steven Romano, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Mallinckrodt. "We are pleased to begin and learn from this important research evaluating nitric oxide gas for potential use in lung transplantation as the company seeks to establish and grow its presence in this therapeutic area."Â Â

About the Study

This proof-of-concept randomized, multicenter, blinded study will assess the effects of nitric oxide in modified criteria human lung transplants via EVLP. It is planned to be conducted at four major U.S. lung transplant centers through the fourth quarter of 2018. The study will evaluate extended criteria bilateral donor lungs, not suitable for lung transplantation. Upon a successful proof-of-concept study, the company expects to initiate a safety study to assess use of nitric oxide in human lung transplantation in 2019.

About Lung Transplantation in Humans

In the U.S. each year, about 2,000 people receive a lung transplant2 â the surgical replacement of either a single or two (double) badly diseased lungs with healthy lungs from a human organ donor. A variety of diseases and conditions can damage a person's lungs and hinder their ability to function effectively, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) includingÂ emphysema; scarring of the lungs; pulmonary fibrosis; cystic fibrosis; sarcoidosis; and pulmonary hypertension.3 A major limiting factor to the number of transplants performed is donor lung shortage.4 According to Organ Procurement Transplant Network data, approximately 1,400 patients with severe lung disease are on the waiting list for a transplant.5

ABOUT MALLINCKRODT

Mallinckrodt is a global business that develops, manufactures, markets and distributes specialty pharmaceutical products and therapies. Areas of focus include autoimmune and rare diseases in specialty areas like neurology, rheumatology, nephrology, pulmonology and ophthalmology; immunotherapy and neonatal respiratory critical care therapies; analgesics and gastrointestinal products. To learn more about Mallinckrodt, visit www.mallinckrodt.com.

Mallinckrodt uses its website as a channel of distribution of important company information, such as press releases, investor presentations and other financial information. It also uses its website to expedite public access to time-critical information regarding the company in advance of or in lieu of distributing a press release or a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosing the same information. Therefore, investors should look to the Investor Relations page of the website for important and time-critical information. Visitors to the website can also register to receive automatic e-mail and other notifications alerting them when new information is made available on the Investor Relations page of the website.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENTS RELATED TO FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This release includes forward-looking statements concerning Mallinckrodt's study of nitric oxide in modified criteria human lung transplants via Ex-Vivo Lung Perfusion including expectations with regard to the study, future research plans and the potential impact on patients. The statements are based on assumptions about many important factors, including the following, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements: satisfaction of regulatory and other requirements; actions of regulatory bodies and other governmental authorities; changes in laws and regulations; issues with product quality, manufacturing or supply, or patient safety issues; future commercialization efforts; and other risks identified and described in more detail in the "Risk Factors" section of Mallinckrodt's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC, all of which are available on its website. The forward-looking statements made herein speak only as of the date hereof and Mallinckrodt does not assume any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events and developments or otherwise, except as required by law.

Mallinckrodt, the "M" brandmark and the Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals logo are trademarks of a Mallinckrodt company. Other brands are trademarks of a Mallinckrodt company or their respective owners. Â© 2018 08/18 </s> Scientists Restore Some Function In The Brains Of Dead Pigs

Enlarge this image toggle caption Stefano G. Daniele and Zvonimir Vrselja, Sestan Laboratory, Yale School of Medicine Stefano G. Daniele and Zvonimir Vrselja, Sestan Laboratory, Yale School of Medicine

The brains of dead pigs have been somewhat revived by scientists hours after the animals were killed in a slaughterhouse.

The Yale University research team is careful to say that none of the brains regained the kind of organized electrical activity associated with consciousness or awareness. Still, the experiment described Wednesday in the journal Nature showed that a surprising amount of cellular function was either preserved or restored.

The implications of this study have staggered ethicists, as they contemplate how this research should move forward and how it fits into the current understanding of what separates the living from the dead.

"It was mind-blowing," says Nita Farahany, who studies the ethics of emerging technologies at Duke Law School. "My initial reaction was pretty shocked. It's a groundbreaking discovery, but it also really fundamentally changes a lot of what the existing beliefs are in neuroscience about the irreversible loss of brain function once there is deprivation of oxygen to the brain."

The brain is extremely sensitive to a lack of oxygen and shuts down quickly. But researchers have long known that viable cells can be removed from post-mortem brains hours after death, says Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.

Such cells can be studied in a lab dish, Sestan says, "but the problem is, once you do that, you are losing the 3D organization of the brain."

He and some colleagues wondered whether it might be possible to study brain cells while leaving them in an intact organ. Doing so meant somehow supplying them with oxygen, nutrients and various other cell-protective chemicals.

The scientists have spent the past six years developing a technique to do that, testing their methods on around 300 pig heads they obtained from a local pork processing center.

"This really was a shot-in-the-dark project," says team member Stefano Daniele. "We had no preconceived notion of whether or not this could work."

After deciding on the final version of their technology, which they call BrainEx, they did a detailed study using 32 pig heads. Daniele says that while at the slaughterhouse, he and fellow researcher Zvonimir Vrselja flushed the brains to clear out residual blood and to cool down the tissue.

Back at the lab, they removed the brains from the pigs' heads and placed the isolated brains in an experimental chamber. The researchers hooked key blood vessels up to a device that pumped in a specially formulated chemical cocktail for six hours, starting about four hours after the pigs had been killed.

These brains ended up looking dramatically different from pig brains that were left alone to deteriorate. "We found that tissue and cellular structure is preserved and cell death is reduced. In addition, some molecular and cellular functions were restored," Sestan says. "This is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain."

The researchers' approach offers a new way to study brain diseases or injuries in the lab and to explore the basic biology of the brain. "We could actually answer questions that we can't now," Vrselja says.

"This is a real breakthrough for brain research. It's a new tool that bridges the gap between basic neuroscience and clinical research," agrees Andrea Beckel-Mitchener of the National Institute of Mental Health who works with the BRAIN Initiative. The BRAIN Initiative, which started in 2013 to accelerate neuroscience research, provided funding for the work.

The researchers emphasize that the goal was definitely not to restore consciousness in these pig brains. "It was something that the researchers were actively worried about," says Stephen Latham, a Yale bioethicist who worked with the team.

The scientists constantly monitored the pig brains' electrical activity, Latham says. If they had seen any evidence that signals associated with consciousness had emerged, they would have used anesthesia and cooling to shut that down immediately.

"And the reason is that they didn't want to do an experiment that raises the ethical questions that would be raised if consciousness were being evoked in this brain," Latham says, "without first getting some kind of serious ethical guidance."

The special solution pumped into the brains included the anti-seizure drug lamotrigine, which is known to block or dampen neuronal activity. That's because "the researchers thought that brain cells might be better preserved and their function might be better restored if they were not active," Latham says.

But tests done on single cells taken from the pig brains, which involved washing off the solution, showed that individual cells were capable of electrochemical responses. So it's unclear whether the team would have seen global electrical activity linked to consciousness in the pig brains if the neuronal-activity blocker had been left out of the treatment or if the blocker had been removed after cells had partly revived.

"That's a very important question, and one that we have discussed at length," Daniele says. "We cannot speak with any scientific certainty to that point since we did not run those experiments."

The potential ethical questions raised by this research range from how to protect animal welfare to how it might affect organ donation from people declared brain-dead.

"The science is so new that we all need to work together to think proactively about its ethical implications so that we can responsibly shape how this science moves forward," says Khara Ramos, director of the neuroethics program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

A few years ago, the Yale researchers consulted with a neuroethics working group convened by the National Institutes of Health's BRAIN Initiative. That's how Farahany learned of the research. She says these results need to be replicated in other labs to see whether they hold up.

But if they do, the findings challenge a lot of assumptions that underlie legal and ethical controls on experiments.

"If it's a dead animal, it's not subject to any research protections because you wouldn't expect that it would suffer from any pain or distress or need to be thought about in terms of humane care," Farahany says. But if that animal's brain can be even partially revived, she asks, then "what do we need to do immediately, today, in order to ensure that there's adequate protections in place for animal research subjects?"

What's more, she adds, "immediately people are going to recognize the potential of this research. If, in fact, it is possible to restore cellular activity to brain tissue that we thought was irreversibly lost in the past, of course people are going to want to apply this eventually in humans."

While there are protections in place for human research subjects, that's not so much the case for dead human tissue, says Christine Grady, chief of the department of bioethics at the NIH Clinical Center.

"Once a human dies and their tissue is in a laboratory, there are many fewer restrictions on what can be done," Grady says. "It is interesting to think about this issue in light of this experiment."

In a commentary that accompanied the research paper in Nature, Farahany and her colleagues Henry Greely and Charles Giattino say the work reminds them of a line from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride: "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive."

Research like this could complicate the effort to secure organs for transplant from people who have been declared brain-dead, according to another commentary written by Case Western Reserve University bioethicists Stuart Youngner and Insoo Hyun.

If people who are declared brain-dead could become candidates for attempts at brain resuscitation, they write, "it could become harder for physicians or family members to be convinced that further medical intervention is futile." </s> Yale University scientists have succeeded in restoring basic cellular activity in pigs’ brains hours after their deaths in a finding that may one day lead to advances in treating human stroke and brain injuries, researchers reported Wednesday.

The scientists emphasized that their work did not even come close to reawakening consciousness in the disembodied pig brains. In fact the experiment was specifically designed to avoid such an outcome, however improbable.

Still, the study raises a host of bioethical issues, including questions about the very definition of brain death and potential consequences for protocols related to organ donation.

The research grew out of efforts to enhance the study of brain development, disorders and evolution. The main practical application is the prospect of allowing scientists to analyze whole brain specimens of large mammals in three dimensions, rather than through studies confined to small tissue samples, Yale said.

The study, backed by the National Institutes of Health, offers no immediate clinical breakthrough for humans, according to the authors.

Results of the experiment, to be published Thursday in the journal Nature, run contrary to long-accepted principles of brain death, which hold that vital cellular activity ceases irreversibly seconds or minutes after oxygen and blood flow are cut off.

The limited rejuvenation of circulatory function and cellular metabolism in pig brains, which were harvested from animals slaughtered at a meat-packing plant, was achieved four hours after death by infusing the brains with a special chemical solution designed to preserve the tissue.

“The intact brain of a large mammal retains a previously underappreciated capacity for restoration of circulation and certain molecular and cellular activities multiple hours after circulatory arrest,” lead researcher Nenad Sestan said in a Yale press release issued ahead of the study.

It was in the lab run by Sestan, a Yale professor of neuroscience, comparative medicine, genetics and psychiatry, that researchers developed the so-called BrainEx system used to pump artificial nutrients into the pig brains’ vascular network.

Scientists stressed, however, that the treated brains still lacked any detectable signs of organized electrical activity associated with perception, awareness or consciousness.

“Clinically defined, this is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain,” wrote study co-author Zvonimir Vrselja, associate researcher in neuroscience.

The BrainEx preservative included substances to block nerve signals. Researchers also were ready to halt any electrical activity that might have emerged through anesthetics and temperature reduction, according to Yale.

While the study offers no immediate therapeutic benefits for humans, it creates a new research platform that may ultimately help doctors find ways to revive brain function in stroke patients or to test new treatments for restoring brain cells damaged by injury, the authors said.

In the meantime, the research could spark new quandaries surrounding the determination of death itself, widely defined by one measure as the irreversible loss of all brain function. The blurring of that line has implications in turn for deciding when doctors are ethically bound to go from preserving a patient’s life to preserving their organs.

“For most of human history, death was very simple,” Christof Koch, president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, said in a Nature article accompanying publication of the Yale study. </s> Scientists restored some activity within the brains of pigs that had been slaughtered hours before, raising hopes for some medical advances and questions about the definition of death.

The brains could not think or sense anything, researchers stressed. By medical standards “this is not a living brain,” said Nenad Sestan of the Yale School of Medicine, one of the researchers reporting the results Wednesday in the journal Nature.

But the work revealed a surprising degree of resilience among cells within a brain that has lost its supply of blood and oxygen, he said.

“Cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window than we previously thought,” Sestan said.

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Such research might lead to new therapies for stroke and other conditions, as well as provide a new way to study the brain and how drugs work in it, researchers said. They said they had no current plans to try their technique on human brains.

The study was financed mostly by the National Institutes of Health. The 32 brains came from pigs killed for food at a local slaughterhouse. Scientists put the brains into an apparatus in their lab. Four hours after the animals died, scientists began pumping a specially designed blood substitute through the organs.

The brains showed no large-scale electrical activity that would indicate awareness. Restoring consciousness was not a goal of the study, which was aimed instead at exploring whether particular functions might be restored long after death. </s> The world’s first successful total penis and scrotum transplant was completed at Johns Hopkins Hospital on March 26, according to a news release issued Monday.

The procedure lasted 14 hours and involved nine plastic surgeons, two urological surgeons and a team of anesthesiologists, nurses and surgical technicians, according to the release. The transplant recipient, who wished to remain anonymous, is a young US serviceman who sustained injuries to his lower pelvis, lower abdominal wall and lower extremities in an improvised explosive device blast while serving in Afghanistan.

“While war injuries cause great suffering, disfigurement, and disability, they have also provided the impetus for medical discoveries,” said Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, chairman of the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Johns Hopkins University and one of the surgeons in the case, in a news briefing.

“While extremity amputations are visible and resultant disability obvious, some war injuries are hidden and their impact not widely appreciated by others,” Lee added. “Genitourinary injury, where the male service members’ external genitalia are lost or severely damaged, is one such ‘unspoken injury of war.’ ”

In order to perform the transplant, the team had to obtain the necessary tissues — consisting of a penis, scrotum, and part of the lower abdominal wall — from a deceased donor, according to Dr. Rick Redett, clinical director of the Johns Hopkins genitourinary transplant program and another surgeon on the case.

“To perform the transplant, we procured the necessary tissue from the donor to restore normal anatomy in the recipient,” Redett said in a statement.

During the procedure, three arteries, four veins, and two nerves were connected under microscopic guidance in order to provide adequate blood flow and sensation to the transplanted tissue, Redett said.

According to Lee, the transplant serves as the culmination of over five years of research and collaboration between multiple medical disciplines at Johns Hopkins.

“In 2013, we assembled a team of plastic surgeons, urologists, transplant specialists, psychologists and bioethicists and began the preparation for genitourinary transplantation,” he said.

“We performed multiple surgical rehearsals of transplant in cadavers. We took notes of what we learned, refined our techniques and devised a plan for both graft procurement and transplantation.”

In 2014, the first successful penis transplant was performed in South Africa by a team of physicians at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town and Tygerberg Hospital. But the current case is the first to include transplantation of the scrotum and parts of the lower abdominal wall, according to Lee.

The transplant is an example of a type of procedure called vascularized composite allotransplantation, or VCA. VCA refers to the transplantation of multiple types of tissue such as skin, muscle and bone, according to the American Society of Transplantation. The term often refers to the transplantation of body parts such as arms, hands, faces and — now — genitals.

“These life-changing VCA transplants can only occur when a donor family looks past their grief and gives to someone in need,” said Alexandra Glazier, president of New England Donor Services, in a statement.

New England Donor Services is a federally designated organization that helps to coordinate organ and tissue transplants in the Northeast region, according to Glazier.

“Since 2009, New England Donor Services has requested and received permission 13 times from families for VCA donation resulting in the transplant of 19 VCA grafts,” she added. “In this case, we worked closely with our colleagues at the Living Legacy Foundation, the organ procurement organization serving most of Maryland, to facilitate and coordinate the recovery of this unique donation for transplant by the Hopkins team.”

According to Lee, the Comprehensive Transplant Center at Johns Hopkins has been a pioneer in many of the recent advancements in VCA procedures.

“Just over five years ago, the first quadruple amputee survivor in Iraq, US Army Sgt. Brendan Marrocco, received a double arm transplant at Johns Hopkins,” Lee said. “And just over five months ago, our team transplanted two new arms into Army National Guard Sgt. Eric Lund, who lost both arms just below his shoulders from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.”

Nearly one month after the procedure, the penis transplant recipient appears to be recovering well and is expected to be discharged later this week, according to Redett.

“Our patient is recovering from the transplant well. He is up walking, and the graft shows no signs of infection or rejection,” Redett said. “It is our hope that such a life-enhancing transplant will allow him to regain urinary and sexual function and lead a more normal life.”

After the announcement of the surgery, the donor’s family, which also was not mentioned by name, also released a statement thanking the recipient for his service: “We are all very proud that our loved one was able to help a young man that served this country. We are so thankful to say that our loved one would be proud and honored to know he provided such a special gift to you. As a family, we are very supportive of all the men and women who serve our country and grateful for the job you did for this nation.” </s> Scientists restored partial cellular function in brains removed from pigs hours after slaughter, according to the new study published in the journal Nature. The achievement raises ethical and philosophical questions about death and how we define it.

A person is considered legally deceased when the brain stops functioning or when the heart and lungs are too compromised to supply enough blood to the oxygen-hungry organ, as Sara Reardon explains for Nature News.

But the veil between life and death is perhaps thinner than many have supposed. Since the early part of last century, researchers have tried to keep animal brains alive soon after death by cooling them and keeping them supplied with blood, but with inconclusive results. Other recent studies have shown that genes in some organs remain active well after death. That’s something Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan, one of the study’s authors, had noticed as well. Small tissue samples he worked with showed signs of cellular viability, even if the tissue had been harvested hours before.

He began to wonder if it was possible to awaken an entire brain after death. To find out, he and his team obtained the severed heads of 32 pigs from a meatpacking plant. They removed the brains from their skulls and placed the brains in a system they call BrainEx, in which the circulatory system of the organ is pumped full of a nutrient and preservative. It also contains a chemical that prevents neurons from firing, stopping any electrical activity from restarting in the brain.

The team found that neurons and other cells resumed normal metabolic function when hooked up to BrainEx. The team was able to keep one brain functional for 36 hours. In control brains without the synthetic blood, the cells began to collapse.

But that doesn’t meant they “revived” the brains. “At no point did we observe the kind of organized electrical activity associated with perception, awareness, or consciousness,” co-first author Zvonimir Vrselja of Yale says in a press release. “Clinically defined, this is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain.”

Ed Yong at The Atlantic reports that the team showed that neurons in the brains could still fire, but they never sparked back to life. Just in case one of their porcine patients did resume consciousness inside its glass sphere, they had anesthetic on hand to stop the process. But that was not necessary. “The pigs were brain-dead when their brains came in the door, and by the end of the experiment, they were still brain-dead,” Stephen Latham, the Yale ethicist that advised the team says.

So is science on the edge of a world where we can preserve brains in jars after death or shuffle them from one body to another? Not really. Michael Greshko at National Geographic reports that the study shows that brains can be kept intact and working longer than we thought, but not conscious or aware.

That means, instead of ushering in an era of sci-fi body-swaps, the study is more likely to allow researchers to better study brain disorders and diseases. “We’re really excited about this as a platform that could help us better understand how to treat people who have had heart attacks and have lost normal blood flow to the brain,” Khara Ramos, director of the neuroethics program at the United States National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke tells Greshko. “It really enhances our ability to study cells as they exist in connection with each other, in that three-dimensional, large, complicated way.”

The researchers say they have no intention of bringing brains back to consciousness and are taking pains to make sure that does not happen. Instead, they hope to continue working with the BrainEx system to extend the longevity of these brains.

Still, the entire concept is raising legal and ethical questions for many, and brings the long held concept of brain death under the microscope. “We had clear lines between ‘this is alive’ and ‘this is dead,’” bioethicist Nita A. Farahany at Duke University tells Gina Kolata at The New York Times. “How do we now think about this middle category of ‘partly alive’? We didn’t think it could exist.”

In an accompanying commentary to the paper, Farahany and her colleagues suggest that this study necessitates the establishment of immediate new guidelines, like using neural blockers and keeping anesthetic handy during this type of research. They also suggest transparency be at the top of the list and that a committee should be established to draw up guidelines and discuss ethical issues as neuroscience pushes the limits of what we thought was possible.
Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston report the first successful transplant of a bio-engineered lung. The lung, taken from a donor pig, was reduced to a protein scaffold, and replaced with the subject pig's own cells over the course of a month.