Question: What is the future of organ transplantation?
Nicholas LaRusso: One of the great things about the liver is that it regenerates. So, if you cut half of someone’s liver, it grows back. That’s why we can now not only use cadaver livers, but we can use portions of living donors. It’s entirely possible, and there’s work being done in this area, that in the future a liver transplant will be no more than an injection of a number of cells that will implant somewhere in the body and will grow and form an entire new liver. This is the whole area of stem cell transplantation
Then I think the last area, and this is a fairly controversial area, but I think has great potential, and the background here is, that as you maybe aware, there are many people particularly with liver disease, many more people that need livers than we currently have livers for.
There’s a whole area called xenotransplantation in which the idea is that we would take animals, pigs are currently the preferred animal, and be able to modify them genetically in such a way that a human would not only not reject a pig liver, but that any potential diseases that would be unique to animals would not be able to be contracted by a human. This is a big concern right now.
You can envision 20 years from now everyone who needs a liver having access to one because you walk in to a facility, you take out a pig and you use the pig liver for the patient.
Technical advances, leading to minimally increasingly, minimally evasive surgery, new drugs and ultimately sufficient understanding of the immune system that no drugs would be necessary, the use of cells rather than whole organs, and potentially the use of animal organs--are probably the four areas of the future when it comes to solid organ transplantation.
Recorded on: June 24, 2009.
Discuss
Laura Gordon on July 2, 2009, 1:56 PM
Xenotransplantation sounds like an amazing new area of research. Besides just the liver I’m curious to hear if there are other organs which are currently being looked at for cross-animal species transplant.
It is striking to me, however, that there seem to be potentially large ethical issues involved here as well. Is it right for people to “harvest” organs from animals? What would be the ramifications of this?
chris konar on July 26, 2009, 10:15 AM
chris konar on July 26, 2009, 10:21 AM
My opinion: Having had a father with serious heart disease and checking/reading copious amounts of information about heart transplants (pig hearts?) many people who had them adopted curious cravings for things like beer, pizza, many saying they never liked the stuff before the transplant? Scary, would we after having a pig transplant want to drink and eat garbage and water from a trough? Acquire diseases only pigs have? I think the folks who want to do this need to experiment on themselves first, then the rest of us can “go for it”!
Jane Do on July 26, 2009, 1:19 PM
The optimal goal for these people is to genetically modify humans. In order to modify humans, they must first modify the animals. In order for them to be able to modify the animals, they must have first been able to modify the plants (which they have already done). There are only selfish reasons why people would want to go along with this.
While what humans do is also “nature”, there are different scientific routes to take, as compared to politics where there are liberals and conservatives. Genetically modifying ANY animal can be considered EXTREME liberalism on a scientific perspective. Engineerng a human liver, per se, which does NOT change genetic makeup, and strictly using human umbilical cords to make one, would be considered a conservative direction to this type of medicine.
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