IN last year, doctors carried out history transplants, placing genetically modified pork kidneys and pig cores in patients. Now, a group of doctors and scientists in China report that they have done the same with a pork liver.
In a study published in NatureThe group describes the transplantation of a pork liver published by the gene in a patient dead from the brain. At the request of the patient’s family, the study ended after 10 days and the pork liver was removed. The patient’s original liver was not withdrawn, so experience served as a way to test if a pork liver could complete the function of failing livers for patients awaiting a transplant.
“The transplanted pork liver has successfully secreted bile and produced an albumin derived from the liver, and we think it is a great success,” said Dr. Lin Wang, a surgeon at Xijing hospital, the fourth military medical university and one of the main authors of the article, during a briefing. “This means that the pork liver could survive the original liver in a human being – and would provide additional support to an injured liver, perhaps in the future.”
Pigs are promising organ sources, but the human immune system rejects transplanted pork tissue. Scientists have circumvented this by genetically modifying the pigs that provide the organs. The liver of donors in this case came from a pork which had received six modifications to certain genes in order to eliminate the main pork proteins which would have led to rejection; The publishing technique also added genes that made the liver more human to immune cells.
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Earlier this year, a surgical team from the University of Pennsylvania said that they had connected a patient who died in the brain to a pig liver published by genes that remained outside the patient’s body, but the results were not published in a journal evaluated by peers. In the Chinese case, Wang and his team transplanted the liver into the patient, connecting the main blood vessels to monitor how much he could produce key compounds such as bile and albumin.
Wang said that the blood flow towards and since the liver, as well as measures of things such as the production of bile and albumin, were encouraging, even if all the functions were not sufficient to completely imitate a human liver. There were changes in the platelets and the coagulation functions shortly after the transplant, but they seemed to be resolved after a few days. The pork liver began to produce bile two hours after transplantation, and albumin levels also started to increase after the operation. When the team analyzed the liver after having removed it 10 days later, there was “no sign of immune rejection,” they wrote in the newspaper.
Transplantation occurred after about a decade of studies and previous transplants by Wang and its team of organ edicts from pig genes to monkeys, including a pig’s heart, a kidney, a cornea and bones. The group also carried out a skin transplant using the pork skin-edition pork in a person with serious burns.
The liver has remained a challenge to transplant with something other than another human liver, because the organ fulfills so many complex functions, Wang said in the briefing. “The heart works like a pump to pump blood towards the whole human body, and the major function of the kidney is to produce urine,” he said. “However, the liver has so many functions. He has digestion functions, to make cytokines [that regulate the immune system]And produce albumin. This is a great success because it is the first time that we can unravel if a liver derived from pork could work well in the human body or could successfully replace a human liver in the future. »»
Wang said that the team had also transplanted a liver published by the pig in a death dead from the brain after removing the patient’s liver, and currently monitored the way the organ can operate alone. He hopes to carry out additional transplants, imitating this study in which the pork liver works with the patient’s liver, as well as the fully replacement of the liver of patients, during the coming year.
