On Jan. 18, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the biotech companies eGenesis and OrganOx announced a major step toward one potential way to address the problem. They hooked up a brain-dead patient to a pig’s liver, which circulated the man’s blood for three days.
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The breakthrough is a mashup of several scientific innovations. The pig donor was a clone created using the same process that produced Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. The clones were created using pig cells gene-edited by CRISPR technology. And the resulting pig liver was hooked up to a perfusion machine that pumped blood between a brain-dead patient and the pig liver.
Related on the SLP
This single-patient study is just the beginning of what xenotransplants can achieve, says [Dr. Abraham Shaked, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania]. The liver has two major duties in the body: regulating critical enzymes and substances such as glucose and cholesterol, and filtering out toxins from the blood. This experiment focused on the latter, but in years to come, more sophisticated pig livers could eventually perform some of the more complex functions of the organ in human patients. The studies needed to get there are already underway.
