Scientists at Harvard and B.U. were able to transplant lab-generated lung tissue into a rat.  The tissue was able to perform regular gas exchange for six hours (at which point it presumably failed).  Report is in this month's Nature Medicine.

Bad-boy writer Christopher Hitchens announced last week that he has been advised to take chemo "on my esophagus," though does not disclose the diagnosis.

The big story from American College of Cardiology this week: the Abbott mitral valve clip may be as effective as open heart surgery to fix leaky mitral valves.  Certainly seems less invasive.

The valve clip is not available in the US, so perhaps this clinical trial result will move the device in the direction of an FDA approval.

http://men.webmd.com/prostate-enlargement-bph/news/20100302/generic-drug...

Oh dear.  I laughed out loud with this one, in WSJ today.  Evidently there are enough peop»

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Researchers at University of Buffalo released preliminary data this week seeming to confirm a link between venous narrowing and multiple sclerosis, a theory known as CCSVI.  ScienceDaily had good coverage with a nice writeup.

"Adipose tissue is an extramedullary reservoir for functional hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells." Got that? No? Here's the simple translation: we now think blood can be made in the fat tissue, not just the bone marrow.

This is just coming out in Blood, a journal I keep up with as a hematologist.

For a blood doctor, this news is fairly mindblowing. We in hematology have this dogma that the blood is made in the marrow, and the presence of "functional hematopoietic stem cells" in the fat implies that at least some of the blood is made in adipose tissue.

This interesting article in NEJM was ignored by the press, probably because it's complex and also because it came out right at Christmas.

Lipoprotein (a) has been around for many years as a coronary risk factor, only problem is we don't have treatments that modify it.

The new paper shows that coronary risk is correlated with blood levels of lipoprotein (a) and these are correlated with genetic variants in inherited DNA.

Eric Topol reviewed this on his blog:
http://blogs.theheart.org/topolog/2010/1/7/lipoprotein-lpa

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/361/26/2518

Researchers in Denver report that blood transfusions at least in mice make cancer spread faster. The spin here is a little more interesting than usual: the sponsoring entity isn't trying to sell expensive Procrit shots but instead is trying to convince us that artificial blood is better. Artificial blood is a concept that refuses to die if only because blood transfusion has a few drawbacks. The idea is most appealing to the military since right now soldiers cannot get transfusions in the field--they must be transported to central medical units with a blood bank.