Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, was given permission by the New England Organ Bank to be the first facility in the United States to perform face transplants.

Doctors at the hospital can begin performing full face transplants within weeks. The procedure has already been performed in China and France but not yet in the United States

Human stem cells could soon be used to treat diabetes, said a study in the journal Nature Biotechnology Thursday. Researchers at the stem cell engineering company Novacell, Inc. in San Diego, California were able to transform human stem cells into nearly normal insulin-producing cells when implanted into mice.

The researchers transplanted immature beta cells derived from human embryonic stem cells into mice whose beta cells had been destroyed by chemical treatment. When they injected these human cells into diabetic mice, the treatment alleviated diabetes in the rodents

Intravenous stem cell transplants could possibly be used within the next five years in repairing damaged brain tissue of patients who have suffered a stroke, researchers at Stanford University say.

Lead researcher Gary Steinberg, a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, and his team tested human stem cells from the brains of donated terminated fetuses and how they reacted with growth factors to be stable

At least 15,000 human kidneys a year are sold and obtained through organ trafficking and many medical professionals are turning a blind eye (and hand) on the practice.

At a United Nations Forum in Vienna, Austria, University of Berkeley Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes accused surgeons and top medical professionals of being in league with criminal elements in targeting desperate transplant patients

A doctor at Columbia University says they have developed new virus genome sequencing technology. It was developed by the university and a Connecticut biotechnology firm and the doctor says it is the best tool to identify infectious diseases quickly and accurately.

According to a report on high throughput DNA sequencing technology, to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, the technique successfully identified arenavirus lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) as the killer of three organ transplant patients in Australia in April 2005. The kidney and liver were from an American donor infected with the virus