{"id":150945,"date":"2022-11-24T00:23:36","date_gmt":"2022-11-24T06:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/will-pigs-solve-the-organ-crisis-the-future-of-animal-to-human-transplants"},"modified":"2022-11-24T00:23:36","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T06:23:36","slug":"will-pigs-solve-the-organ-crisis-the-future-of-animal-to-human-transplants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/will-pigs-solve-the-organ-crisis-the-future-of-animal-to-human-transplants","title":{"rendered":"Will pigs solve the organ crisis? The future of animal-to-human transplants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/will-pigs-solve-the-organ-crisis-the-future-of-animal-to-human-transplants2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Unnecessary playing with nature.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>In January, Bennett\u2019s doctors offered him the chance to receive a heart from a pig. He took it. \u201cI know it\u2019s a shot in the dark, but it\u2019s my last choice,\u201d he said in a press release from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where he was being treated. On 7 January, doctors transplanted the heart, which had been genetically modified so that the human body would tolerate it.<\/p>\n<p>Bennett survived for eight weeks with his new heart before his body shut down. After his death, the research team learnt that the transplanted organ was infected with a pig herpesvirus that had not been detected by tests<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-022-03794-2#ref-CR1\">1<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n<p>But even a few weeks is a long time for an animal organ placed in a human, known as a xenotransplant. Given that the human immune system begins attacking non-genetically modified pig organs in minutes, other xenotransplantation researchers are impressed with the experiment. \u201cIt\u2019s actually beyond my expectation that the patient lived up to two months,\u201d says Luhan Yang, a bioengineer and chief executive of Qihan Biotech in Hangzhou, China. \u201cI think it\u2019s a victory for the field.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unnecessary playing with nature. In January, Bennett\u2019s doctors offered him the chance to receive a heart from a pig. He took it. \u201cI know it\u2019s a shot in the dark, but it\u2019s my last choice,\u201d he said in a press release from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where he was being treated. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}