Although safer than donor transplants, autologous transplants are not without risk.

Surgeons use laparoscopic-assisted surgery to remove the colon or the kidney during live donor transplants.

This is almost always a deceased donor transplant.

If the artificial cornea proves successful in human studies, it could one day replace donor transplants.

The artificial cornea he developed has been used in the U.S. since 1992 in patients who are not candidates for donor transplants.

Several hospitals, including the University of Iowa's, are experimenting with "living donor" transplants, which involve using part of a healthy adult's liver.

Feasibility of the Living Living donor transplants are feasible, surgeons say, because the liver regenerates itself.

We want to put ourselves out of business because then that will mean no one will die because of lack of a donor transplant.

The state fined the hospital, found other deficiencies in its transplant unit and halted its program for living donor transplants to adults for two years.

But in its report, published last May, it also called for "a careful review and assessment" of the practice of living donor transplants.