A pig liver consultant to evaluate pig disease for organ transplants in clinically dead people, humans and pigs in the US, China and Europe
Shaked wonders if pig livers need surgery in order to be useful to humans. The heart and the liver are similar, but the heart is more easy to transplant and the liver more difficult. Shaked doesn’t believe that pigs will be able to produce the broad array of the human genome needed for other functions, but he does believe that pigs will be able to excrete waste.
The chief executive of a company that is developing pigs as a source for organs expects more organ transplants in clinically dead people, and in dying people in the United States, China and Europe.
Dou says the pig was bred in a specialized pathogen-free facility and tested negative for about a dozen pathogens, including Streptococcus suis, the type-2 strain of Mycoplasma pneumoniae and porcine cytomegalovirus. So far, he has not seen signs of an immediate form of organ rejection and the liver is producing bile. “This is encouraging,” says Cooper.
The researchers have also taken daily blood samples and liver biopsies and will assess immune response, infection risk and liver function in detail. “We’re having a pathologist evaluate if there’s acute rejection,” says Dou.
Annihilation of a Clinically Dead Person to a xenotransplantation Operating in a Liver and a Brain
The surgery was approved by the recipient’s family and several university committees, says Wang. It has been done according to international and national laws.
The researchers plan to repeat the procedure in another clinically dead person later this year — and next time they will remove the person’s existing liver.
Mohiuddin points out that although clinically dead people are a useful model for assessing the viability of xenotransplantation in living people, that usefulness is limited, because once a person’s brain ceases activity, they undergo hormonal changes. He says that it isn’t yet clear how long someone without cognitive function can be kept on a ventilator or pig organ. The longest documented case was a pig-kidney transplant.
Yang says she hopes the team will publish detailed insights about the transplantation in peer-reviewed publications, to help determine which approach is more feasible.
Slayman received a transplant after being on the transplant list for seven years. Slayman had a transplant about five years ago but it showed signs of fail after about a year. He’s since been suffering serious complications.
“I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” Slayman said in a statement released by the hospital.
The transplant could solve a problem in medicine that has been problematic for a long time, namely that access to the transplant for ethnic minority patients is poor due to the scarcity of donor organs.
Biotechnology for transplanting: The need for pigs to be cloned before they are rejected or rejected by the body and that is what a human can do
Several companies are racing to develop cloned pigs whose DNA has been altered so that they aren’t rejected by the human body or spread pig diseases to other people or cause other problems. NPR recently got exclusive access to a research farm breeding these animals for a company in this competition, Revivicor Inc. of Blacksburg, Va.
“We are grateful for the courageous contribution of the patient and to the advancement of transplantation science,” said Mike Curtis, chief executive officer for eGenesis in the statement. This is a new frontier in medicine, and shows that genome engineering is possible to change the live of millions of patients.
The field is excited about the ways in which technology can be applied to solve the shortage of organs for human transplantation. More than 100,000 people are waiting for an organ. They can’t get one so they die every day.
Several concerns are being raised by the research. There is a possibility of spreading animal viruses to humans. Another is about slaughtering thousands of animals every year to harvest their organs. Some also question testing these organs on gravely ill patients.
“I think we should be very careful,” L. S. Johnson, a bioethicist at Upstate Medical University, told NPR. “I have a lot of concerns about a therapy that is very much unproven.”