By Timo Minssen I am happy to announce the publication of our new working paper on “Patenting Bioprinting Technologies in the US and Europe – The 5th element in the 3rd dimension.” The paper, which has been co-authored by Marc Mimler, starts out by describing the state of the art and by examining what sorts of bioprinting inventions…
By Brad Segal Manuel—not his real name—was admitted to the hospital with decompensated heart failure. As a child he had scarlet fever which, left untreated, had caused the valves of his heart to calcify and stiffen. Over time, pumping against increased resistance, his heart’s contractions began to weaken until finally, they lost all synchrony and…
By Brad Segal In January of this year, Cell published a study modestly titled, Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. It reports success bioengineering a mostly-pig partly-human embryo. One day before, Nature published a report that scientists had grown (for lack of a better word) a functioning genetically-mouse pancreas within the body of a…
By Brad Segal In my last post I characterized how overdoses from the surging opioid epidemic have become the fastest-growing cause of mortality among organ donors. In this update, I raise one potential consequence with ethical and policy implications: so-called donor-derived infections. To be clear, I focus primarily on organ recipients as deaths from drug overdose,…
By Brad Segal The surging opioid epidemic is a threat to the nation’s public health. This year the CDC reported that mortality from drug overdose reached an all-time high, with the annual death toll more than doubling since 2000. Yet in the backdrop of this epidemic, the country also faces ongoing shortages of a different sort–too few…
By Shailin Thomas NPR recently published a thought-provoking piece discussing an ethical dilemma doctors face when treating patients in need of organ transplants. Transplant list priority is designed to depend upon the relative sickness of patients, allocating organs to those who need them most. However, instead of lab results or other direct measures, the list uses…
[Cross posted at the OUPBlog] By John A. Robertson The birth of a healthy child in Sweden in October, 2014 after a uterus transplant from a living donor marked the advent of a new technique to help women with absent or non-functional uteruses to bear genetic offspring. The Cleveland Clinic has now led American doctors into…
By Cansu Canca In April, a kidney donation from an unrelated living donor was put on hold in South Portland, Maine. The reason was unusual: the generosity of the community. In response to an online fundraising for the donor, 768 people contributed over $49,000—well beyond what can reasonably be called “compensation.” The hospital thus had…
By Arthur Caplan A new opinion piece by contributor Art Caplan along with Stephen Wall and Carolyn Plunkett, in JAMA: In the United States, the majority of deaths occur unexpectedly, outside hospitals or in emergency departments. Rarely do these deaths provide opportunities for organ donation. In Europe, unexpected deaths provide substantial numbers of transplantable organs through uncontrolled donation after…
HLS Health Law Workshop: Robert Truog March 2, 2015 5:00 PMGriswold Hall, Room 110 (Harvard Law School)1525 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA [Map here.] Download the Presentation: “Defining Death: Getting It Wrong for All the Right Reasons” Robert D. Truog is Professor of Medical Ethics, Anaesthesiology & Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Associate in Critical Care Medicine at…
