Will Cropping Pig Organs End the Long Waits for Transplants
About 22 Americans die each day waiting for a transplant. Making human-compatible pig organs could go a long way toward alleviating the shortage of transplant organs.
Pig organs are essentially the right size for transplantation to replace damaged organs in humans. Unfortunately, there are two problems standing in the way.
First, human immune systems speedily reject transplanted pig organs.
And second, the genomes of pigs are loaded up with endogenous retroviruses (PERV) that might become activated and cause diseases after organs have been transplanted.
Rejection occurs because pig organs are decorated with carbohydrate moleculesthat human antibodies recognize as foreign and then attack. The New York Timesnotes that other researchers have already had some success in using gene-editing to clone pigs without the tell-tale porcine carbohydrates. Keep reading…