30 May 2007

The shadow pig



In the United States, there are around 60 thousand patients waiting for a suitable organ for transplantation, and around ten of them die every day for lack of organs. In order to address the problem of insufficient supply of donor organs, many groups of research have been carried out to study the possibility of developing genetically engineered pig organs for transplantation. After years of hard work, the idea has been successful to some stage, pig skin and pig valves are now used in human transplants. Normally, transplantation between humans is done by staving off the target organ related immune system with the aid of immunosuppressant drugs. However, when the technique is employed between species, more severe immune rejection will arise due to the absence of some specific sugar in human. The specific sugars will be recognized as foreign material by the circulating antibodies which results in immediate swarming and attacking of the antibodies, and ultimately, the death of the organ.
With the latest genetic engineering technology, the dream of animal organ transplantation is half way through, scientists can now create an genetically engineered pig that have reduced problem with those specific sugars, which extends the life span of the organ in the new host. This has bought the human-animal organ transplantation project a big step forward. Although a lot of ethnic issues have been run on, the genetic program is getting mature and human-animal organ transplantation will come to pass in the near future.
posted by Wing Yeung LAU, 41365690
Primary resource:
Pig-To-Human Transplants on the Horizon
- http://www.marylinstransplantpage.com/pig-human06.htm
Secondary resource:

at 5/30/2007 10:54:00 pm