A View of the Road Ahead to Viable Xenotransplantation

In principle, engineering pig organs to survive in humans is a viable project for this age of biotechnology. Pig organs are the right size, and strategies exist to address the known issues in rejection of tissues, transfer of retroviruses, and the like. An entire industry is coming into being based on enabling cells and tissues from one individual to be introduced into another without rejection. Much of the work needed to make that possible between individuals of the same species also enables transplantation between species. In a world in which organs fail, and transplants are in limited supply, there are several roads ahead towards providing an unlimited, on-demand supply of replacements. Xenotransplantation is one of them, farming engineering pigs for their organs. Secondly, there is decellularization, taking a donor organ and stripping it of cells, leaving the extracellular matrix and all of its chemical cues, before introducing the recipient's cells to repopulate the empty organ. Further, researchers are working to be able to build organs from scratch, from a cell sample. This is a challenging process in which the major hurdle remains the establishment of complex small-scale capillary networks. Lastly, there is the longer-term prospect of entirely artificial, machine organs, a field that receives less attention and seems likely to fall behind given advances in biotechnology. It has hard to say which of the biological approaches will win out in the next few d...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs