Transplanting Pig Hearts Into Humans

By Camerist - Own work, Swine heart CC BY-SA 4.0 The scientific journal Nature recently published an article from Munich University Hospital which describes the long-term survival of baboons that had received a heart transplant from genetically modified pigs.1 This is an important step forward on the way to being able to give humans porcine heart transplants.

Pig hearts are very similar in size, anatomy and function to human hearts, so are used to train medical students. Porcine hearts are the gold-standard in pre-clinical animal testing for all cardiovascular devices prior to use in humans to both test the safety and efficacy, and refine the implant procedures. Read more...

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Animal to human organ transplants

Could a genetically engineered pig heart one day function in a person?

On a farm in Virginia, a company called Revivicor is breeding pigs that have some genetic similarities to humans. The scientists call them GalSafe pigs, and they have added five human genes to the pigs' livers, kidneys and hearts. The hope is that the organs can be harvested and used for transplants, and that human bodies won’t reject them.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s sort of working. Revivicor (started by the British company PPL Therapeutics that produced Dolly the cloned sheep) is making strides in the slowly growing field of xenotransplantation, or the transplanting of non-human organs or cells into a human body. The first step has been to make transplants from one animal species to another a reality. Read more.

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Creating chimeras for organs

A Japanese stem cell scientist has obtained permission to create human-animal chimeras and transplant them into surrogate animals. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a researcher at the University of Tokyo and at Stanford University, plans to insert induced pluripotent human cells into mouse embryos. His ultimate aim is to grow human organs in animals.

This kind of procedure was banned in Japan until March, when the government issued new guidelines permitting scientists to create human-animal embryos which can be brought to term. The creation of chimeras in the laboratory is permitted in other countries, like the United States, but the human-animal hybrids cannot be brought to term. Read more.