Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Transplant

To show its gratitude to all laboratory professionals, the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine celebrated Medical Laboratory Professionals Week April 22-26, with a host of activities, such as Phillies Night, in appreciation of all the hard work and dedication of the hundreds of staff and faculty members working in more than 30 different laboratories across the Penn campus.

In a previous post, I noted that most of my work as Digital Communications Editor takes place online, rarely expanding beyond the reaches of my keyboard. But that was five months ago, and six months since I got my first in-depth view of the whole Penn Medicine enterprise while shooting...

As a Digital Communications Editor, much — if not all — of my typical day is spent behind a keyboard in a regular office separate from our clinical facilities. For someone who is relatively new to Penn Medicine, this can create issues of scale. You’re told from the very beginning...

When it comes to organ transplants, the closer the match between donor and recipient, the better the outcome. This is especially true for bone marrow transplants, which have more stringent requirements for matching than solid organs since they aim to rebuild all the bone marrow in the patients after treatment...

The Penn Transplant Institute’s reputation draws patients from across the nation who are waiting for a second chance at life. It is the region’s leader in total number of organ transplants performed; Penn transplant surgeons performed over 400 solid organ transplants during the 2011 fiscal year, including heart, liver, kidney,...

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. This month marks the five-year anniversary of Penn Medicine’s first implantation of a temporary total artificial heart (TAH) in a patient suffering from end-stage...

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. It may seem thoroughly unromantic, but researchers at Penn Medicine’s Cardiovascular Institute are hoping for some broken hearts this Valentine’s Day. But these broken...

Due to the complex, interdependent nature of the human body’s internal organs, transplant specialists are constantly working to develop new procedures for disorders that extend beyond a single organ. Increasing success with single solid-organ transplantation over the last 50 years has helped propel the field into the more complicated realm of multi-organ transplantation. The first dual-organ transplant, which provided a 6-year-old Texas girl with a new heart and liver, took place on Valentine’s Day in 1984, but just over 100 heart-liver transplants have been performed in the nearly three decades since. Penn Medicine transplant physicians are at the forefront of this work, performing 19 of these combination transplants since 2002 – the second largest number of any transplant center in the U.S., most of whom have only done one or two of the procedures.