First modification:
They are called xenotransplantation and, after decades of research, the teams working on them in the United States have reaped their greatest successes, such as transplanting a pig heart into a living patient. In a world where organ shortages claim lives daily, this option appears as a viable alternative.
It sounds like science fiction, but it happened recently: a group of doctors at the Hospital of Maryland successfully transplanted a heart from a genetically modified pig into a patient.
This is the first time something like this has happened. For decades, animal-to-human transplants had failed, but improvements in genetic modification systems have made this option possible again.
The pigs that produce these organs have an inhibited biomolecule that differentiates all mammals from primates and also has six human genes, all with the aim of ironing out the differences between the species that would cause the human body to reject the organ.
From there, everything is simpler: “what we did was follow step by step what we do daily in human-to-human transplants (…) We want to show that we can do a xenotransplantation in exactly the same way,” he explained. Jayme Locke, a surgeon at the University of Alabama, after grafting porcine kidneys into a brain-dead patient.
A solution to the organ shortage?
Recent successes in heart or kidney transplants are celebrated by the scientific community. The World Health Organization estimates that only 10% of the transplants needed worldwide are performed. This lack of organs has a price: every day 17 people die in the United States because of it, 20 in Colombia, 22 in Mexico.
In the United States alone, in 2020 a quarter of the kidneys that were needed were transplanted, forcing thousands of patients to live with dialysis until they find another option.
That is why the scientific community celebrates the good news of xenotransplantation as it has become a viable option to save the lives of thousands of people who need a transplant and do not have a donor. “Imagine how many people we could help,” Locke projected.
Along the same lines, Bartley Griffith, a surgeon at the University of Maryland and one of those responsible for porcine heart transplantation, reflected the following: “What everyone wants is not to be limited only to the supply of human organs for transplantation. If organs can be treated like this, from an animal, they could be marketed almost like a medicine and produced on demand”.
The ethical debate: the life of animals and the abandonment of solidarity
“Marketed almost like a medicine”: precisely these words of Griffith, which for many suppose a life expectancy, alarm others for various reasons.
On the one hand, xenotransplantation involves sacrificing the lives of pigs in most cases. In figures from the United States, each year there are 63,000 patients who need a kidney transplant. Approximately 23,000 kidneys are collected, from living and deceased donors, but that leaves a gap of 40,000 unsatisfied transplants.
If xenotransplantation were to become a reality on a large scale, those figures mean that approximately 20,000 pigs would have to be slaughtered to provide kidneys for all patients, a small number compared to the meat industry but one that raises suspicion.
On the other hand, another reason for concern is that a donation system that is currently based on altruism will become a business where those with money can buy porcine organs and those who do not have to wait on waiting lists.
For now, the main company that generates these organs is the American Revivicor, a private subsidiary of PLL Therapeutics, one of the companies involved in the famous cloning of Dolly the sheep. And you could hold the future of organ transplants in your hands.
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