Essay Organ Transplants

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Organ Transplants Have you ever been watching TV and organ donor commercials come on? Or have you read articles in the newspapers and science magazines, where someone is one step closer to growing a heart or liver in a lab? Seriously, how do they keep a person alive during operations like that? I honestly can’t fathom the kind of technology that we came up with; doctors cannot just save a person’s life but increase their quantity and quality of it. The first successful organ transplant happened on December 23, 1954, it was led by Dr. Joseph Murray and Dr. David Hume at Brigham Hospital in Boston (DonateLifeNY). It was operated on a set of twins, Ronald and Richard Herrick. Richard was dying of kidney disease. Since the pair were twins and had the same genetic makeup, the doctors agreed to do the operation, knowing Richard’s body would most likely be compatible and not reject the organ. This operation was very important because it opened the door in the medical community to start doing more research in to a surgery that was thought to be impossible. The thing about organ transplants is that not everyone has a twin. In 1983 the FDA approved Cyclosporine, an anti-rejection medicine for the patients that numbs the immune system so the body won’t reject the organ. Cyclosporine stopped the method that used constant radiation of X-rays, which knocked out the immune system, but in many cases killed the patient. The making of Cyclosporine showed its drastic effects because in 1986, the first year being used, about 9,000 kidney transplants were performed in the United States and they had a greater than 85% survival rate (PBS). It made it so that organ transplants can be less extreme and safer for patients to get. Recently now that more research has been conducted and techniques for transplants have been adjusted, the rates for survival have been working its way up. The rates for 1st year transplant survival, in 2008, for kidney transplants is a 96.5% from a living donor and 92% from a deceased donor (Integrisok). The higher the survival rates the better, it is pretty simple why. But a problem we are facing now because the survival rates are getting higher, means more people can have operations done, is that there is a shortage of organ donors. That shows that there aren’t enough organs that can be donated. As a solution to the shortage of organs, labs have started to have to try and make custom made organs. Dr. Anthony Atala and his research team at Wake Forest University Medical Center made the World’s first lab grown bladder. The lab grown bladder is the first to be transplanted as an entire organ. Their current research is growing 22 different types of tissue such as heart valves, muscle cells, arteries, and even fingers. Different tissue is made up of different cells. So a graft was made from a patient’s trachea cells and transplanted to replace part of her airway that was degraded due to disease. Growing these partial parts of organs means we are one step closer to growing more complex organ structures in the future. This will help patients by being free
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