"Graft"y World Play
If you’re feeling "selfish," you might prefer this type of transplant where you are both the donor and the recipient—like moving skin from your hip to your arm.
What is an autograft?
In 1954, Joseph E. Murray performed the first truly successful kidney transplant; the recipient proved it worked by living for this many more years.
What is 25?
It’s a "therapeutic trade-off": some drugs used to save a new organ end up being nephrotoxic, which is bad news for this specific body part.
What is the kidney?
If you’re a heart or a lung, you’ve got a strict "travel time" of only this many hours before you’re no longer viable for transplant.
What is 4 to 6 hours?
This "jet-setting" ethical nightmare involves patients traveling across borders to purchase organs, often leaving legal and medical questions in their wake.
What is organ trafficking?
To get an Isograft, you’d better hope you have one of these types of siblings to share the load
What is an identical twin?
Known as the "Father of Transplantation," this man won the 1960 Nobel Prize for discovering that the immune system can actually be "taught" to play nice.
Who is Peter Medawar?
This diagnostic test measures how "picky" a recipient’s immune system is by seeing what percentage of the general population they are sensitized to.
What is Panel Reactive Antibody?
Tick-tock! A new name is added to the national transplant waiting list roughly every this many minutes.
What is eight?
Because their organs are the right size and they are easy to genetically engineer, this farm animal is the "top dog" candidate for future xenotransplantation.
What is a pig?
Don't call it a "pig in a poke"—this term describes a transplant between two different species, such as a heart from a pig to a person.
What is a xenograft?
This 1912 Nobel Prize winner took a "stitch in time" approach by using embroidery techniques to figure out how to suture blood vessels.
Who is Alexis Carrel?
When blood flow returns to a transplanted organ, this process causes "oxidative stress" and releases "DAMPs" (danger signals) to the immune system.
What is reperfusion?
While the U.S. uses an "Opt-in" model, this European country assumes you’re a donor by default, giving them the world's highest donation rates.
What is Spain?
This ethical dilemma asks: who should get the organ first? The sickest person, the youngest person, or whoever has been on this the longest?
What is the waiting list?
While an allograft is the most common, this specific type of rejection is the "speed demon" of the group, occurring within minutes to hours.
What is hyperacute rejection?
In 1936, Yurii Voronoy attempted the first human kidney allograft, but the patient died, likely because this many hours passed before the kidney was procured.
What is six hours?
This type of rejection is the "speed demon" of the group, occurring within just minutes to hours of the surgery.
What is hyperacute rejection?
Sadly, this is the number of people who pass away every single day while waiting for a life-saving organ.
What is 13?
When patients don’t follow their medical "orders" post-op, it’s called this; it’s a major factor in up to 50% of transplant failures.
What is noncompliance?
This term refers to the immune response triggered by an alloantigen, which is found in some, but not all, members of a species.
What is alloimmunity?
Way back in the 1500s, this Italian surgeon was "nosey" enough to use skin from a patient's arm to reconstruct their face.
Gasparo Tagliacozzi?
This specific recognition pathway involves the recipient’s T-cells getting "up close and personal" with the donor’s own antigen-presenting cells.
What is the direct pathway?
Currently, there are more than this many people on the national transplant list—it's a six-figure number!
What is 103,223?
These "self-markers" act like a cellular ID card; with so many variations, they are the most polymorphic "fingerprint" in your entire genome.
What is HLA (Human Leukocyte Antigen)?