animal-to-people transplants

[casadiscaes]

Mais uma para dar que falar aos "amiguinhos dos animais"

Hog-wild for pig organs: Hub doc’s pet project: animal-to-people transplants
By Jessica Fargen
Boston Herald Health & Medical Reporter
Sunday, October 29, 2006

Harvesting pig organs and transplanting them in humans may not be that far off, says one doctor, whose Boston-area lab is genetically engineering swine, putting their organs in baboons and waiting to see if it works well enough to try in people.
“I see the possibility in the future of having pigs available that would be tailored to have the best possible kidneys or best possible liver or lungs to transplant into a human being,” said Dr. David Sachs, director of the Transplantation Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“All of these people’s lives could be saved by a transplant.”
Sachs, a passionate 64-year-old surgeon, is among a handful of doctors nationwide feverishly fighting for federal funding and pharmaceutical company backing for cutting-edge research into xenotransplantation - the use of animal organs in humans.
About 18 people die each day in this country while waiting for an organ, and more than 90,000 are on the national waiting list.
Sachs, who has been breeding pigs for three decades, believes that within a few years, pig organs could be saving people’s lives.
So far, however, no one’s been able to do it.
The work that Sachs is doing in his Boston-area lab costs a lot of money and progress can be slow. Federal funding doesn’t allow Sachs to move as fast as he would like and private backing, from drug companies, has been hard to come by in recent years.
Of the 14 active applications for human xenotransplantation trials, only two were filed after 2001, according to the FDA, which would have to approve any pig-to-human transplants.
In 2003, scientists in the MGH lab, which was then receiving millions of dollars in funding from drug company Novartis, bred a pig that was lacking a key sugar molecule that is present in pigs, but not humans and primates. Without this molecule in the pig cells, the primate, and hopefully human, immune systems won’t recognize the organ as foreign and won’t immediately attack and kill it.
In 2004, Sachs’ team put one of the pig kidneys inside a baboon. It lived for 83 days. A baboon would have to live a year to justify a human trial, Sachs said.
Nineteen days ago, Sachs’ team put one of these pig kidneys in a baboon and it’s still alive.
Fellow doctors say they’ve struggled to figure out how to trick the human immune system into accepting a foreign organ.
“That’s a big hurdle. How do you get the human immune system to not recognize this as a nonhuman tissue?” said Dr. Marlon F. Levy, surgical director for transplantation at Baylor All Saints Medical Center in Forth Worth, Texas.
Levy, who is familiar with Sachs’ work, said xenotransplantation holds great promise, but leaves questions as well.
“Do you you create unintended consequences, where it’s more difficult to fight infections? What’s the safety profile of these organs?” he asked.
But Alix Fano, director of the Campaign for Responsible Transplantation, said money should be spent on disease prevention and bolstering the organ donor list, not the “dead-end technology” of xenotransplantation.
“They are trying to overcome the basic reality that animal organs don’t belong in human bodies. They really don’t,” she said. “They are trying to make it work, no matter how badly it’s failed.”
Sachs said he got into the transplant field because he hated to see people die while waiting for organs. One day a week, he does rounds at MGH, where he helps care for people who are waiting for organs he knows they may never get.
That’s what drives him.
“People are dying every day, not able to get organs,” he said. “They are on waiting lists. Those people’s lives could be saved if we could get xenotransplants to work.”
More info:
There are 93,533 people on the national organ donor waiting list. Here is how many patients are waiting for various organs:
Kidney.....68,374
Liver.....17,073
Lungs.....2,885
Heart.....2,828
Kidney/Pancreas.....2,413
Pancreas......1,736
Heart and lungs.....146
Intestine.....237
Source: United Network For Organ Sharing

in http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegio ... format=&am

[LuMaria]

Isto arrepia-me até à alma! A questão que ponho é se a minha vida dependesse da morte de um porco o que faría???? Esta dúvida é atroz, pelo menos para mim...

[leoa_nova_]

Xenotransplantes... Agora já se conseguem manipular células estaminais sem matar embriões... Portanto eu não estou de acordo com estas investigações, deviam virá-las para o caminho mais díficil e mais humano