Animal-to-human transplants, called xenotransplants, have failed for decades because people’s immune systems rejected the foreign tissue.
The US Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to allow a small number of Americans who need a new organ to volunteer for rigorous studies of either pig hearts or kidneys.
A liver has different complexities than kidneys and hearts: it filters blood, removes waste and produces substances needed for other bodily functions.
In a statement, the Penn team reported that the donor’s body remained stable and the pig liver showed no signs of damage.
There’s lots of work into developing liver dialysis-like machines, and experiments using pig livers were tried years ago – before today’s more advanced genetic techniques, said Dr Parsia Vagefi of UT Southwestern Medical Center, who was not involved in the new experiment but is closely watching xenotransplantation research.
“I applaud them for pushing this forward,” Vagefi said, calling this combination pig-device approach an intriguing step in efforts toward better care for liver failure.
The original article contains 395 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Animal-to-human transplants, called xenotransplants, have failed for decades because people’s immune systems rejected the foreign tissue.
The US Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to allow a small number of Americans who need a new organ to volunteer for rigorous studies of either pig hearts or kidneys.
A liver has different complexities than kidneys and hearts: it filters blood, removes waste and produces substances needed for other bodily functions.
In a statement, the Penn team reported that the donor’s body remained stable and the pig liver showed no signs of damage.
There’s lots of work into developing liver dialysis-like machines, and experiments using pig livers were tried years ago – before today’s more advanced genetic techniques, said Dr Parsia Vagefi of UT Southwestern Medical Center, who was not involved in the new experiment but is closely watching xenotransplantation research.
“I applaud them for pushing this forward,” Vagefi said, calling this combination pig-device approach an intriguing step in efforts toward better care for liver failure.
The original article contains 395 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!