Last month, PLoS Medicine published an article about "xenotransplantation," or transplanting animal organs into humans. Right now animal organs function far better over time than artificial ones, and researchers several years ago created a transgenic pig whose organs may be easier to transplant into humans without rejection. Unfortunately, as the author of the PLoS article says, xenotransplantation has fallen out of favor in recent years -- partly because it turned out to be more difficult than had been previously realized, but partly because researchers have such high hopes for things like tissue engineering (growing new human organs from existing cell cultures).
Still, there are good reasons to bring xenotransplation back to the lab -- unlike artificial organs such as heart-assist devices, xenotransplanted ones don't cause blood clots. As the PLoS article points out, there have been some amazing xenotransplant breakthroughs in the past year, though the risks remain formidable:
Wait -- did you get that? One risk of xenotransplantation is that humans might start getting animal diseases. But what about getting animal benefits? You know, pig organs might make humans a hell of a lot tastier when fried.
Clinical Xenotransplantation of Organs: Why Aren't We There Yet? [via PLoS Medicine]
