Xenotransplantation To Save And Extend Lives — Dr. David K.C. Cooper, MD, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

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Dr. David K. C. Cooper, MA, PhD, MD, MS, DSc (Med), FRCS, FACS, FACC, FAST, (https://researchers.mgh.harvard.edu/profile/27073950/David-Cooper) is a pioneering heart transplant surgeon and researcher in the field of xenotransplantation, which is defined as any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation or infusion into a human recipient of live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source.

Dr. Cooper studied medicine in the UK at Guy’s Hospital Medical School (now part of King’s College London), and trained in general and cardiothoracic surgery in Cambridge and London.

Between 1972 and 1980, Dr. Cooper was a Fellow and Director of Studies in Medical Sciences at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1980 he took up an appointment in cardiac surgery at the University of Cape Town where, under Professor Christiaan Barnard, he had responsibility for patients undergoing heart transplantation.

In 1987, Dr. Cooper relocated to the Oklahoma Transplantation Institute in the USA where he continued to work in both the clinical and research fields.

When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.

He’s an immunologist in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Jambo, who works for the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers. But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before the omicron variant emerged. “I was very shocked,” he says.

So to fill in the true picture, Jambo and his collaborators turned to another potential source of information: a repository of blood samples that had been collected from Malawians month after month by the national blood bank. And they checked how many of those samples had antibodies for the coronavirus. Their finding: By the start of Malawi’s third COVID-19 wave with the delta variant last summer, as much as 80% of the population had already been infected with some strain of the coronavirus.

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New findings from Malawi suggest the country has entered something akin to the endemic stage of the pandemic — along with many other African nations.

A newly developed technology platform has the potential to treat diseases like diabetes, IBS, and obesity by using enteroendocrine (EE) cells found in human intestinal cells, according to a recent study. Although enteroendocrine cells make up only about 1% of intestinal cells, they produce around fifteen different hormones that play a role in regulating digestion and metabolic function.

Creating Organoids

The new organoid platform, developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, is meant to pinpoint drugs that can increase the amount of EEs and encourage them to generate more needed hormones. “There’s been interest in exploiting human intestinal stem cells and EE cells to treat disease,” says David Breault, MD, Ph.D. in a statement. Breault is associate chief of the Division of Endocrinology at Boston Children’s. “But the field is still in a nascent stage. This will open new avenues of discovery.”