The Prospect of Growing Human Organs in Animals as a Source of Transplants

Farming animals is morally dubious, to say the least, but we live in a world in which most people are accepting of this practice. That doesn't make it right, and I think that this will change in the future. For now, however, anyone who finds farming animals for meat ethical should also consider it ethical to create genetically altered animals that contain either human organs or organs that can be humanized. The purpose in doing this is to provide a large supply of organs for transplantation, alleviating the present shortage of organs for that purpose. This is not the only approach, of course. Many research groups are working towards the growth of new organs from tissue samples, where the creation of blood vessel networks sufficient to support larger tissue sections is the biggest challenge. Others are investigating the use of decellularization to expand the pool of donor organs by recovering those that are damaged and would normally be discarded. But back to sourcing organs from animals, there are a number of ways to obtain organs for transplantation in this way. The first is to use decellularization with an appropriately sized organ, and pigs are a useful species in this respect. The pig cells are stripped away, leaving the extracellular matrix and its biochemical cues. Human cells of the necessary types, derived from the transplant recipient, are introduced to repopulate the organ. This line of development is still somewhere in progress, as other species have a handf...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs