An 8-year-old has become the first child in the world to receive a bilateral hand transplant. The procedure was carried out by surgeons based at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, assisted by colleagues from Penn Medicine.

A large-scale clinical trial across six European countries will this year begin to test the use of adult stem cells as a treatment for knee osteoarthritis.

The micro-hearts are around half a millimetre in diameter, and each has its own ventricle-like chamber. It’s the first time that researchers have managed to create three-dimensional heart-like organs in the lab from stem cells alone, without using any sort of scaffold to create the organ’s shape.

Right and left living donor kidneys harvested laparoscopically offer comparable post-transplant donor and recipient outcomes, researchers concluded in a presentation at the Canadian Urological Association annual meeting in Ottawa.

Two studies published in Nature and Cell this month show that organoids, miniature organs that can be cultured in a dish, could be crucial for personalized treatment of cancer.

A man in his mid-50s with Parkinson’s disease had fetal brain cells injected into his brain last week. He is the first person in nearly 20 years to be treated this way – and could recover full control of his movements in roughly five years.

Zain Rajani was born three weeks ago in Canada after his parents opted for a new type of IVF marketed under the name Augment. The procedure is supposed to enhance the quality of a woman’s eggs by injecting them with mitochondria taken from her ovarian stem cells.

Researchers have pinpointed a primary cause of a rare skull disorder in infants, and the discovery could help wounded soldiers, car-wreck victims and other patients recover from disfiguring facial injuries.

Doctors at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children (PMH, Australia) have developed an insulin pump which acts like an artificial pancreas and are using the ground-breaking technology to treat diabetes.

Researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia are 3D-printing their own artificial human brains in the lab, in an ambitious project that sounds like something out of science fiction.