Life Sciences & Medicine Active Updated Jul 30, 2026
Closing the organ shortage from two directions
More than 104,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney and 17 die every day before one arrives. Two separate advances, a supercooling technique that keeps kidneys viable for days instead of hours and a shift toward donation after circulatory death rather than only brain death, are each expanding the organ supply, and the arc will run as both move from early results toward wider clinical use.
The story so far
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Jul 30, 2026 Latest
Reasons to be Cheerful reported that voucher-based kidney donation chains let a donor give locally while pushing a friend's intended recipient to the top of their own region's waitlist, producing better regional matches than a direct swap could. Only about 500 Americans donate a kidney to a stranger each year even though more than 90,000 people are on the US kidney waitlist and 12 to 17 die waiting daily.
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Jul 24, 2026
Texas A&M thermodynamicist Matthew Powell Palm built a pressure-controlled device that chills kidneys to -4C without ice forming, keeping them viable for days instead of the usual 24 hours, and rewarmed pig kidneys transplanted from the device outperformed organs stored on ice. Separately, nearly half of US organ donors now give after their heart stops rather than after brain death, a method called donation after circulatory death that new preservation machines have made practical at scale.
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