Breakthrough Surgery : Heart transplant, but from a pig скачать в хорошем качестве

Breakthrough Surgery : Heart transplant, but from a pig

On 7th January 2022, a 57-year old man in the United States suffering from a heart disease received a transplant from a genetically modified pig. Surprised? The process is called Xenotransplantation, where organs or tissues from animals are grafted or transplanted to humans. But, this is not the first time that the procedure has been attempted. In the 1960s, chimpanzee kidneys were transplanted into humans where one of them survived for over nine months. In the 1980s, a baboon’s heart was transplanted into a baby, who died a few days later. Most notably, in 1997 a surgeon from Assam in collaboration with a doctor from Hong Kong attempted a pig to human heart transplant in Guwahati where the patient survived for seven days. Both the doctors were arrested under the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 for culpable homicide and arrested for over a month. They had not applied for registration for the process. Today, he remains confined to his campus premises, even two decades later. This is in the wake of many hurdles that doctors face, where sometimes even a well matched human donor organ is rejected by the patient’s body. So, it might take a long time to refine this practice. The patient from the US, Mr. Bennett is still connected to a heart-lung bypass machine as doctors wait to give a definitive prognosis of the procedure. He is also being monitored for infections like porcine retrovirus which might be transmitted to humans during such a procedure. Two technologies - gene editing (where the DNA is inserted, deleted or modified) and gene cloning (where a genome is copied out of all DNA extracted from an organism) have made it more likely for patients to survive such a transplant. In this case, 6 human genes were inserted into the pig to make its organs more tolerable to the human system. If this therapy is matured, it might bring hope to thousands of patients across the world who die of organ failure every day.