Donor heart and lung procurement: A consensus statement.

Heart and lung procurements are multiphased processes often accompanied by an array of complex logistics. Approaches to donor evaluation and management, organ procurement, and organ preservation vary among individual procurement teams. Because early graft failure remains a major cause of mortality in contemporary thoracic organ transplant recipients, we sought to establish some standardization in the procurement process.

Radiation Therapy in Resectable Intrathoracic Sarcomas. A Rare Cancer Network Study.

Purpose: Intrathoracic sarcomas (ITS) are considered rare tumors and have a dismal prognosis. We investigated outcomes and risk factors for local control (LC), disease-free survival (DFS), and overall survival (OS) in patients with resected nonmetastatic ITS treated with or without adjuvant radiation therapy (RT) and/or chemotherapy.

Methods And Materials: Patients from the Rare Cancer Network database were studied.

[Lung epithelioid hemangioendothelioma: Report of one case].

Epithelioid hemangioendothelioma is a multifocal tumor that rarely metastasizes. It is difficult to diagnose, most often it is an incidental finding in young asymptomatic women. The radiologic pattern is heterogeneous.

Importance of left atrial pressure during ex vivo lung perfusion.

Background: Ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) allows for the evaluation and treatment of donor lungs before transplant. Different EVLP strategies have been described using either an open left atrium (LA) (pressure of 0 mm Hg) or closed LA (pressure of 5 mm Hg). We hypothesized that maintaining a physiologic positive LA pressure during EVLP is protective to the lung.

Modified In Vivo Lung Perfusion for Local Chemotherapy: A Preclinical Study With Doxorubicin.

Background: In vivo lung perfusion (IVLP) is a promising adjuvant treatment of lung metastases, allowing the localized delivery of drugs to the lungs without systemic exposure. Previous experimental and clinical data resulted in variable efficacy and frequent toxicity. Our objectives were to demonstrate the feasibility and safety of a novel protective IVLP technique coupled with the delivery of sarcoma-based chemotherapy to the lung.

Efficient gene delivery to pig airway epithelia and submucosal glands using helper-dependent adenoviral vectors.

Airway gene delivery is a promising strategy to treat patients with life-threatening lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis (CF). However, this strategy has to be evaluated in large animal preclinical studies in order to translate it to human applications. Because of anatomic and physiological similarities between the human and pig lungs, we utilized pig as a large animal model to examine the safety and efficiency of airway gene delivery with helper-dependent adenoviral vectors.