ORGAN TRANSPLANTS ARE A GROWING TREND BUT WE STILL HAVE NOT PERFECTED THEM FOR HUMAN USE

Each day in America there are 56 transplants of all kinds performed on needy patients. Last year doctors performed 23,000 transplants nationwide. The problem is there are never enough donor organs available to serve the need. In fact there are currently almost 105,000 people awaiting the availability of donor organs. That the need is critical is obvious. A definition of the two main transplant operations are: An “autograf transplant” of tissue is from one to oneself. Examples include skin grafts, vein extraction for CABG, etc. Sometimes this is done to remove the tissue and then treat it or the person, before returning it. Examples include stem-cell and storing blood in advance of surgery. An “allograft” is a transplanted organ or tissue from a genetically non-identical member of the same species. Most human tissue and organ transplants are allografts. This however will result in the receiver of organs be required to take immuno-suppressive drugs to prevent their body's antibodies rejecting and destroying the new organ. The first reasonable account of transplantation is of the Indian surgeon Sushruta in the second century BC. The operative skills were present long before the necessities for post-operative survival were discovered. Rejection and the side effects of preventing rejection (especially infection and nephropathy) were, are and may always be the key problem. Roman Catholic accounts report the third-century saints Damian and Cosmas as replacing the gangrenous leg of the Roman deacon Justinian with the leg of a recently deceased Ethiopian. Early transplants dealt with skin transplantation mostly.

We all know of some of the regularly transplanted organs like Heart, Lung, En bloc Heart/Lung  and you may even know of  Kidney, Liver, Pancreas, Intestine. Some of the other regularly transplanted human parts include Hand, Cornea, Skin graft including Face replant, Pancreas Islet Cells, Bone marrow/Adult stem cell, Blood transfusion/Blood Parts Transfusion, Blood vessels, Heart valve, Skin, etc.

The first successful corneal allograft transplant was performed in 1837 in a gazelle model; the first successful human corneal transplant, a keratoplastic operation, was performed by Eduard Zirm in Austria in 1905. Major steps in skin transplantation occurred during World War I. It was not until the discovery of cyclosporine in 1970 that transplant surgery found a sufficiently powerful immuno-suppressive. The first “successful” heart transplant was achieved in 1967 by Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa. Louis Washkansky, the recipient, survived for eighteen days. A recent FDA approved immune function test from Cylex has shown effectiveness in minimizing the risk of infection and rejection in post-transplant patients by enabling doctors to tailor immuno-suppressant drug regimens. This should take us a long way to projectible success in our efforts to cure physical problems and make this every- day successes. The next great advance should be growing new organs for transplant from the patient’s own molecules so there will be no rejection problems at all.