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Transplantation is a medical procedure in which an organ, tissue, or cells are removed from one organism and placed in a recipient organism, often to replace a damaged or missing function.

The donor and recipient may be at the same location, or organs may be transported from a donor site to another location. Organs and tissues that are transplanted within the same person's body are called autografts. Allografts can either be from a living or cadaveric source. Organs that have been successfully transplanted include the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, intestine, thymus and uterus. Worldwide, kidneys remain the most commonly transplanted organs, followed by liver and heart. Hartwell Harrison performed the first organ removal for transplant in 1954 as part of the first kidney transplant. Cornea and musculoskeletal grafts are the most commonly transplanted tissues; these outnumber organ transplants by more than tenfold. Organ donors may be living individuals, or deceased due to either brain death or circulatory death. Tissues can be recovered from donors who have died from circulatory or brain death within 24 hours after cardiac arrest. Transplantation raises a number of bioethical issues, including the definition of death, when and how consent should be given for an organ to be transplanted, and payment for organs for transplantation. Other ethical issues include transplantation tourism (medical tourism) and more broadly the socio-economic context in which organ procurement or transplantation may occur. Transplantation medicine is one of the most challenging and complex areas of modern medicine. Some of the key areas for medical management are the problems of transplant rejection, during which the body has an immune response to the transplanted organ, possibly leading to transplant failure and the need to immediately remove the organ from the recipient. As of September 9, 2022, the United States reached one million cumulative transplants according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), with kidneys being the most common globally.

Most human tissue and organ transplants are allografts.

In the opposite direction, attempts are being made to devise a way to transplant human fetal hearts and kidneys into animals for future transplantation into human patients to address the shortage of donor organs.

Overall postoperative complications after kidney transplantation occur in approximately 12% to 25% of kidney transplant patients.

The foundation for national organ policy was laid with the passage of the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) in 1984, which led to the creation of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).

In December 2006, after failing to receive credible assurances from the Chinese government about allegations relating to Chinese prisoners, the two major organ transplant hospitals in Queensland, Australia, stopped transplantation training for Chinese surgeons and banned joint research programs into organ transplantation with China.

Organ transplantation in Singapore is generally overseen by the National Organ Transplant Unit of the Ministry of Health (Singapore). The Organ Donor Registry maintains two types of information, firstly people of Singapore that donate their organs or bodies for transplantation, research or education upon their death, under the Medical (Therapy, Education and Research) Act (MTERA), and secondly people that object to the removal of kidneys, liver, heart and corneas upon death for the purpose of transplantation, under the Human Organ Transplant Act (HOTA).

Thyroid transplantation became the model for a whole new therapeutic strategy: organ transplantation. Some of these transplants were done in animals for purposes of research, where organ removal and transplantation became a successful strategy of investigating the function of organs. Pioneering work in the surgical technique of transplantation was made in the early 1900s by the French surgeon Alexis Carrel, with Charles Guthrie, with the transplantation of arteries or veins.

In 2021, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a report titled Exploring the State of the Science of Solid Organ Transplantation and Disability which discussed quality of life after transplantation.

Quick Facts

• Other ethical issues include transplantation tourism (medical tourism) and more broadly the socio-economic context in which organ procurement or transplantation may occur.
• Transplantation raises a number of bioethical issues, including the definition of death, when and how consent should be given for an organ to be transplanted, and payment for organs for transplantation.
• As of September 9, 2022, the United States reached one million cumulative transplants according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), with kidneys being the most common globally.
• Transplantation medicine is one of the most challenging and complex areas of modern medicine.
• Hartwell Harrison performed the first organ removal for transplant in 1954 as part of the first kidney transplant.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Transplantation (medicine)". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.