Following our previous experience with cardiac xenotransplantation of a genetically modified porcine heart into a live human, we sought to achieve improved results by selecting a healthier recipient and through more sensitive donor screening for potential zoonotic pathogens. Here we transplanted a 10-gene-edited pig heart into a 58-year-old man with progressive, debilitating inotrope-dependent heart failure due to ischemic cardiomyopathy who was not a candidate for standard advanced heart failure therapies. He was maintained on a costimulation (anti-CD40L, Tegoprubart) blockade-based immunomodulatory regimen.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objective: The impact of menopause on the brain is not well understood. Hormonal changes, including puberty and pregnancy, influence the onset and course of multiple sclerosis (MS). After menopause, a worsening of MS disease trajectory measured on the clinician-rated Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) was reported in some, but not all, studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvaluating the quality of research ethics committees (RECs) is crucial but challenging due to the difficulty of developing meaningful quality measures. Recently, commentators assessed ten quality instruments for RECs, including the Research Ethics Committee Quality Assurance Self-Assessment Tool developed for RECs in the Arab Middle East. They identified several missing items in this tool regarding safeguarding participants' rights and welfare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInvestigations regarding perceptions of the institutional research integrity climate in the Arab Middle East remain underexplored. We surveyed faculty from three Egyptian universities. We utilized the Survey of Organizational Research Climate (SOuRCe) tool, which incorporates seven subscales that measure different aspects of the research integrity climate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFXenotransplantation offers the potential to meet the critical need for heart and lung transplantation presently constrained by the current human donor organ supply. Much was learned over the past decades regarding gene editing to prevent the immune activation and inflammation that cause early organ injury, and strategies for maintenance of immunosuppression to promote longer-term xenograft survival. However, many scientific questions remain regarding further requirements for genetic modification of donor organs, appropriate contexts for xenotransplantation research (including nonhuman primates, recently deceased humans, and living human recipients), and risk of xenozoonotic disease transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF