liver

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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Computer model predicts how our livers will store fat

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Computer model developed to predict how ‘T09’ causes the liver to store fat could be used to predict liver fat storage for other drugs and conditions

As part of an effort to understand how an experimental drug for atherosclerosis causes the build-up of fat in the liver, scientists have developed a computer model that can predict how the rate at which liver stores fat in response to various situations. Being able to model liver fat storage gives researchers a way to predict the side effects of drugs and environmental factors at much earlier stages in the research and drug development process, possibly reducing the number of experiments involving animal models. Additionally, this computer simulation helps describe all of the possible ways in which the liver stores fat, including how the liver takes up or creates fats and how it disposes of fat. This knowledge could lay the foundation for future research regarding the liver and its functions. This was published in the April 2015 issue of The FASEB Journal.

 

 

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Why a deadly drug didn’t hurt rat livers.

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Scientists believe they’ve solved the mystery of why a diabetes drug introduced in 1997 caused fatal liver failure in 63 patients.

Their discovery makes it likely that similar drug-related deaths can be prevented in the future.

In 1997, troglitazone was approved for use in the United States as one of the first drugs designed to treat type 2 diabetes. It was withdrawn from the market in 2000 after 63 people died from liver failure after taking it.

No one at the time really understood what happened. In preclinical studies using rats, there was no sign of danger to the liver. During human trials, adverse effects from the drug were characterized as rare and relatively mild. There were some hints at the potential for liver damage, but they weren’t enough to prevent approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

“Rats didn’t have a problem handling the drug, and the human trials weren’t large enough for the true risk of liver injury to become apparent,” says Paul Watkins, coauthor of the study and professor of medicine and pharmacy at University of North Carolina. He is the director of the Hamner-UNC Institute for Drug Safety Sciences.

“Once the drug was given to a larger population that contained patients unable to properly process the drug, people started to turn yellow and die of liver failure.”

 

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