There are more than 15,000 patients waiting for a liver transplant in the USA, with an average waiting time of 468 days and a mortality rate as high as 15-20%. Until artificial organs or xenotransplantation becomes a reality, living donor liver transplantation remains the best option for patients with end stage liver disease.

Galway, Ireland CCN1 Coating Allows Successful Re-Endothelialization of Ovine Decellularized Heart Valves with Endothelial Cells Differentiated from Circulating EPC in vitro Andres Hilfiker, Alexandru Calistru, Tanja Meyer, Axel Haverich [email protected] Leibniz Research Laboratories for Biotechnology and Artificial Organs, Hannover, Germany, Clinic of Cardiac, Thoracic, Transplan...

THE TECHNOLOGY of implantable vascular prostheses and extracorporeal circulation is now commonplace in modern medicine. The essential function of this technology is the passage and/or processing of blood in some manner, and this inevitably requires intimate and prolonged contact between the blood and various manmade devices, e.g., pumps, valves, tubing, membranes, etc. Some systems, such as the...

BACKGROUND The design of new technologies for treatment of human disorders such as protein deficiencies is a complex and difficult task. Particularly, the construction of artificial organs, based on the immunoisolation of protein-secreting cells, requires the use of suitable materials which have to be biocompatible with the immunoisolated cells and avoid any inappropriate host response. METHO...

The importance of developing artificial media that can be used in the place of serum for maintaining the life of tissues and organs outside the body hardly needs to be emphasized. Many of the studies for which the organ culture technique 1 was developed, as well as others that can be carried on by the simpler methods of tissue culture, depend for their success on the creation of suitable artifi...

Regenerative medicine is expected to be a novel therapeutic system in this century [1–3]. The human body consists of 200 cell species generated from immature stem cells. In the 1990s, a treatment transplanting hematopoietic stem cells to replace all blood cells was established and successfully cured leukemia [4]. With this as amodel, stem cell transplantation therapy is being developed to resto...

BACKGROUND Aspartame (L-phenylalanine N-L-alpha-aspartyl-1-methyl ester) is an artificial sweetener with widespread applications. Previously published results have shown that among rats receiving aspartame a significant increase of lymphoreticular neoplasms, brain tumours and transitional cell tumours occurred. The aim of our short-term experiment was to investigate the biological effect of asp...