Health Transplant Organs from Pigs in next 3 years

[The Helper]

Organs from pigs could be widely available for transplanting into patients in a decade, Lord Winston said yesterday.

The first organs suitable for transplanting, most likely kidneys, are expected to be ready within three years and, if tests are successful, their use could be widespread by 2018.

A herd of as few as 50 pigs is expected to be kept as breeding stock to provide organs “to order” and to slash waiting times for thousands of people needing transplants.

Professor Winston, of Imperial College, London, and his collaborator, Carol Readhead, of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, are leading research into transplanting animal organs into people.

Pig Organs for Humans Coming? | National Review

We have an organ shortage that desperately needs ameliorating. With such pressing needs, some wish to bend or even break important ethical rules by, for example, obliterating the dead donor rule so…

www.nationalreview.com

 

[Dr.Jack]

Great! Think about the amount of lives that could be saved every year. The real problem is making such operations legal.

Pigs are regarded as ideal for animal-to-human transplants, xenotransplantation, and other research because of the similarity in the physiological make-up and because they get many of the same diseases, such as diabetes.

Slightly disturbing if you think about that.

 

[Broderick]

The best of the comments on the Times website...

Is this kosher?
Eldras Ellis, london, uk

 

[Varine]

Prime material to get yourself made fun of....

 

[The Helper]

Update on this... it looks like it was not 5 years but I think this is the first news I have seen in here that something has come from it...

How pig organs made their way into humans: The slow advance to transplant kidneys and hearts

The transplant team from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) kept doing everything right: Time and again they transplanted a heart from a pig that had been genetically modified so that the organ would not be rejected by the baboon that received it. Sure enough, the baboons’ immune systems did not attack the hearts. The grafts on the arteries held, and the hearts pumped blood — for about 48 hours.

Then the hearts slowly stopped beating. “It was like they were running out of gas,” recalls Muhammad Mohiuddin, MBBS, the lead surgeon-scientist on the team and director of the cardiac xenotransplantation program at UMSOM in Baltimore.

The xenotransplantation team learned that doctors performing the same procedures in Germany were keeping the pig organs in the XVIVO Heart Box — a machine that uses a special solution to preserve each heart until the moment comes to implant it. When the UMSOM team started using that process three years ago for its pig heart transplants, Mohiuddin says, the baboons lived for up to nine months.

That is why 57-year-old David Bennett lives today with a pig heart in his chest — having become the first living person to receive a genetically modified animal heart through a surgery last month at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

How pig organs made their way into humans: The slow advance to transplant kidneys and hearts

After 20-plus years of quiet research, doctors recently made history with four xenotransplants. Here is how they progressed and what they hope to achieve next.

www.aamc.org