Researchers have been finding ways to transform animal organs, especially pig liver, to look and act like human organs, in the quest to ease the nation’s transplant shortage.
after receiving the world’s first heart transplant from a pig last January — an animal genetically modified so its organs didn’t trigger an immediate attack from the human immune system. The FDA is considering whether to allow additional xenotransplantation experiments using kidneys or hearts from gene-edited pigs.
The Miromatrix approach stems from research in the early 2000s, when regenerative medicine specialist Doris Taylor and Dr. Harald Ott, then at the University of Minnesota, pioneered a way to completely decellularize the heart of a dead rat. The team seeded the resulting scaffolding with immature heart cells from baby rats that eventually made the little organ beat, garnering international headlines.
“We can’t take billions of cells and push them into the organ at once,” Ross said. When slowly infused, “the cells crawl around and when they see the right environment, they stick.” “If you can just get over the hump, then you might actually recover” — because the liver is the only organ that can repair itself and regrow, said Mount Sinai’s Florman. “I’ll be excited when they get their first patient enrolled and I hope that it’s with us.”
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