The number of additional organ transplants made possible in the U.S. each year, if all goes as planned with new efforts, led by transplant surgeon Dorry Segev, to transplant organs from HIV-positive donors in recipients also infected with the virus. In March, Segev’s Johns Hopkins team became the first in the nation to do an HIV-positive kidney transplant and the first in the world to execute an HIV-positive liver transplant. Segev is now working with 30 other hospitals in the U.S. to get similar surgeries going across the country. Look for more on Segev’s six-year fight to win federal approval for HIV-positive transplant surgery in the next issue of Hopkins Medicine magazine.

“You can think of metastasis as The Amazing Race. [Metastatic] cells encounter many different challenges as they attempt to grow and spread, and some cells are better at different events than others, so traveling in a group makes sense.”

Cell biologist Andrew Ewald, summarizing new research in mice suggesting that cancer cells rarely form metastatic tumors on their own, as conventional wisdom once held, but instead prefer to travel in groups to increase their collective chances of survival. The Johns Hopkins scientists reported on their work in the Feb. 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

“Our experiments show that the architecture and function of our lab-made intestine strikingly resemble those of the healthy human gut, giving us real hope that our model could be used as the backbone for replacement intestine.”

David Hackam, surgeon-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, whose team from Johns Hopkins and the University of Pittsburgh used stem cells to grow healthy intestine atop a 3-D scaffold made of a substance used in surgical sutures. Their laboratory-created intestine successfully regenerated gut tissue in the colons of dogs with missing gut lining—holding promise for creating an implantable intestine as replacement therapy for a range of devastating disorders.