Sayak Banerjee, Amity University Kolkata
Many a time, a heart transplant is the only hope of survival for patients with any cardiac problems when every other surgery fails. For this, they have to wait for too long.
Cardiac xenotransplantation has been a target of scientists globally for years, and in one year, pig hearts might be transplanted to humans. A team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) had published a recent analysis on the success of implanting pig hearts into baboons overcoming all the barriers through genetic engineering and drug development.
The team had elucidated that to prevent the immune system from attacking the pig hearts as “foreign”, genetically modified pigs were produced which were devoid of the carbohydrates that were the main target of the immune system. Moreover, to limit and control blood clots caused due to the incompatibility between human blood proteins and pig blood proteins, the pigs were engineered with a gene encoding for a human version of a protein, thrombomodulin.
Additionally, the researchers developed monoclonal antibodies that obstruct “costimulatory” molecules, CD40, and CD154 to inhibit the human immune cells from attacking the pig organs more convincingly than by immunosuppressants.
A question aroused that whether this transplant operation would impart some infectious diseases into humans or not. To this, one of the researchers had said that it was quite improbable because the culmination of the number of dedicated researches implemented by his team and others over the last few decades is such that it seems as pig-to-human heart transplantation is possible and could save many lives in the process.
He estimated that by the end of 2021, the first humans could receive pig hearts.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.120.048186
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