The emergence of new options to help people who require an organ transplant should not discourage donation, said Rubén Argüero Sánchez, head of the Department of Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and first Latin American to transplant a heart.
On January 11, the University of Maryland, in the United States, announced that the first transplant in the world of a genetically modified pig heart was performed on a 57-year-old man with untreatable heart failure, a process in which in which the company Revivicor Inc.
At the time of making the announcement, the patient had three days of survival with the organ, which shows that it works without being immediately rejected by the body, but to be considered a successful procedure, it is necessary to wait at least one hundred days, he explained.
Argüero Sánchez highlighted: “This news quickly stimulates the investigation to continue, we cannot say that it is a success. We have to wait, because doing xenotransplantation (putting an animal’s organ into a person) is not easy, it generates problems that include bioethics, respect for animals and many other things”.
Currently, he added, 10 percent of those on the waiting list to receive an organ in the world die due to lack of donations, especially kidneys.
It is not the first time that a procedure of this type has been attempted, the researcher specified; however, until now, patients who received an organ of animal origin have not had a survival greater than 30 days.
The dream of transplanting functional animal organs is more than 30 years old and it has been seen that the pig is phylogenetically closer to the human, which is why several of its tissues have been used, such as the pericardium to build heart valves; the urethra, for use in men, and islets of the pancreas.
Kidney transplants from chimpanzees and other close primates were attempted before 2000, but the patients died, he said.
The key to this new transplant, explained Argüero Sánchez, is the work carried out by the private company Revivicorp, “an example of genetic jewelry that works with genes that have been linked to the body’s rapid response to rejection and with human genes that are they have put in the pigs so that their organs are more tolerated”.
On its farms, it produces hearts, lung lobes and kidneys, but the maintenance cost is very high due to the care that the animals require, something that a public health system could hardly afford.
“Saying that there are already pigs and organs would discourage donation and that is a global problem, especially when it comes to liver, heart, pancreas and kidney, which are required in enormous quantities,” the researcher emphasized.
He recommended that these organs should be seen more as a transitional step in achieving a compatible human organ, as well as continuing to investigate options such as the use of stem cells for the regeneration of damaged human organs.
Today, the world is working on the regeneration of tissues where the use of stem cells has shown important advances. In Mexico, it has been seen that 70 percent of the patients showed significant improvements, an investigation that for various reasons has been stopped.
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