kidney

HIV-positive donor’s kidney, liver given to to HIV-positive patients

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(CNN)There is new hope for potential transplant recipients living with HIV. Doctors at Johns Hopkins announced Wednesday they successfully performed the first liver transplant from an HIV-positive donor and the first U.S. kidney transplant from the same donor. The surgeries happened a couple of weeks ago.

The recipients, whose names will remain anonymous, are also HIV-positive. The patient who received the donated kidney has been living with HIV for more than 30 years, suffers from hypertension and autoimmune problems, and had been on dialysis. That patient had been on the organ donation waiting list for years, doctors said.
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Scientists are growing mini-kidneys from skin cells

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Add this to the list of things you can grow in a petri dish: An honest-to-goodness mini-kidney.

Australian scientists have successfully developed a method that allows mini-kidneys to be grown from stem cells in a lab — an achievement that could help with drug research, as well as one day possibly providing assistance to those in desperate need of a kidney transplant.

Using stem cells derived from human skin cells known as fibroblasts, the team “encouraged” the cells to form a miniature organ, Melissa Little, a professor at the University of Queensland, told Mashable Australia. The research was published in Nature.

 

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Watch a kidney branch out like a tree as it forms

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Peek inside this mouse kidney and watch a bunch of cells turn into an organ. Captured by Nils Lindstrom from the University of Edinburgh, UK, this video reveals how cells are instructed to branch out like a tree to form the kidney’s internal plumbing.

By analysing time-lapse images, Lindstrom and his team discovered that a protein called beta-catenin manages the organ’s development by ordering cells to form winding tubes called nephrons. These produce urine by filtering waste from blood.

In the video, yellow areas show where the protein is most active. The amount of activity seems to determine which part of the structure the cells should form. The researchers found that they could alter which part of the nephron grew where by tweaking the activity of the protein.

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