History in the making: World’s First Genetically-Edited Pig Kidney Transplant into Living Recipient Performed at Massachusetts General Hospital PRESS RELEASE of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Brandon Chase. Mar. 21 2024. See here for the original report. Today, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) announced the world’s first successful transplant of a genetically-edited pig (porcine) kidney into a 62-year-old man living with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). Surgeons from the Mass General Transplant Center conducted the four-hour-long surgery on Saturday, March 16. The procedure marks a major milestone in the quest to provide more readily available organs to patients. ...

Madonna said “strike the pose” in Vogue. Today, let’s stike the TERMINOLOGY: Kidney exchange 101 the concept of “exchange” Kidney transplantation is essential for patients with late-stage renal failure. While a healthy individual can donate one of their kidneys to their loved ones, often the donor is incompatible with the intended recipient. Kidney exchange allows such patient–donor pairs to swap donors so that each patient can receive a kidney from a compatible donor. ...

When opportunity comes, say, when you find yourself sharing an elevator with a Nobel Prize winner in your field, with just a few floors left to impress them. It’s sales pitch in academic–to impress people using a concise, compelling summary that highlights the brilliance and relevance of your work. It’s your chance to leave them thinking, “Wow, I need to know more about this!” In my journey, I often find myself needing to explain kidney exchange to introduce people to market design—my dream field. However, I sometimes struggle with organizing my language or recalling precise facts. Therefore, in the coming days, I will be doing a literature and fact review on kidney exchange and general transplantation. Stay tuned for more insights!

The maternity care units in both the United States and China are facing a dilemma that threatens the very foundation of obstetric services. This crisis, while nuanced in its manifestation in each country, shares a common thread of financial strain, staffing challenges, and misaligned incentives that put the future of maternity care at risk. The American Struggle In the United States, the situation is particularly dire in rural areas, where more than 200 hospitals have closed their labor and delivery services over the past decade. This trend leaves pregnant individuals in these regions more vulnerable, with higher risks of intensive care unit admission, mortality, and infant mortality. The absence of local maternity care services means that many patients are unable to obtain adequate prenatal or postpartum care, a necessity for ensuring healthy outcomes for both mother and child. ...

Imagine you’re analyzing a group of general undergraduates taking math classes. Some are social science majors who might be taking introductory statistics, while others are engineering majors taking advanced calculus. You need some index to measure the average difficulty level of the math classes taken by all these students, say, Stats101 for 1pt while Real Analysis gets 10pt and we’ll take arithmetic mean as the difficulty score representing the general course level taken by all the students. In a hospital setting, patients would have different conditions that require different levels of care, resources, and expenses. The Case Mix Index (CMI) is a numerical value that represents the average severity and complexity of patients’ conditions treated in a hospital or a specific department. A higher CMI indicates more complex and resource-intensive cases. ...

When we’re all born, Saturn’s somewhere. And the Saturn cycle takes around about 29 years. That’s when we’ve gotta wake up and smell the coffee. Because if we’ve just been sort of relying on our cleverness, or relying, you know, just kind of floating along… Saturn comes along and hits you over the head, and says, “Wake up”. It’s time for you to get real about life And sort out who you really are. ...

My favourite so far, for Ariana Grande’s new album eternal sunshine is its intro (end of the world). Every intro of Ariana Grande’s album is insanely beautiful. She tends to use softer instruments (especially strings) to company her voice, which leave space for her vocal showcase. For example, the intro of My Everything is almost as dreamy as falling into the galaxy’s star dusts. Not to mention the iconic 30-seconds solo acapella raindrops (an angel cried) of Sweetener. ...

My mother is a doctor and leads the obstetrics department at a major hospital. Managing such a busy department, with over a hundred staff members, is a challenging task. In recent years, administrative responsibilities in healthcare management have become increasingly complex, that I can observe a significant surge in her phone call frequency. In 2019, new official guidelines for public hospital performance evaluation were introduced, leading to an annual grading campaign. This evaluation is based on 26 measurable metrics derived from the hospital’s operational data. ...

Introducing the zero-sum competition system of the business world into healthcare, education, and many other industries that are far more complex than mere data, is nothing short of pathological. For the following days, I will dive into a reported pitfall of the current medical evaluation system. In China, the performance of public hospitals are largely evaluated on their CMI index–over a uniform standards across different departments. This seemingly convenient approach results in distorted incentives, chaos management and complaints. Upcoming discussion would relates anatomy of the current practise, reviews from news and drawing analogue from some literatures I’ve read before. ...

The wild world of course registration heats up during the last round of selection, where occasionally seats are released due to dropouts and the remaining dash for the vacancy. But what if I told you there’s a clever way to outsmart the system? No more frantic refreshing, here’s nifty little program I concocted that plays the waiting game for you. It keeps an eagle eye on course availability and sends you an email the moment a spot opens up. ...