CIENCIASMEDICASNEWS: No monkey business: pig to baboon organ transplants increasingly successful

domingo, 10 de abril de 2016

No monkey business: pig to baboon organ transplants increasingly successful

No monkey business: pig to baboon organ transplants increasingly successful

by Xavier Symons | 9 Apr 2016 |

A team of researchers in the US have performed a series of remarkably successful interspecies organ transplants. Specifically, they transplanted genetically modified pigs hearts into baboons and kept the ‘graft organs’ alive for a median of 300 days.

The researchers, led by Muhammad M. Mohiuddin of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in Maryland, published a paper detailing their findings in Nature Communications this week.

Mohiuddin and his colleagues transplanted genetically modified ‘human-like’ pigs hearts into the baboons while administering a series of special drugs to prevent rejection. Importantly, the researchers didn’t remove the baboon’s own heart, but rather connected an additional heart to the circulatory system of the animals, allowing their own hearts to beat as normal.

With their targeted interventions, the researchers managed to keep the hearts (and the baboons) healthy for many months, and one survived for 945 days.

The researchers say that new-targeted interventions, such as the blocking of communication between immune cells and the administering of blood thinners, allowed for greatly increased organ survival.

"These hearts could have gone even longer, but we wanted to test to see if the animals had developed some kind of tolerance to the organs," Mohiuddin told science magazine The Verge.

Several research teams around the world are conducting similar research into xenotransplantation – the transplantation of tissue or organs from one species to another – in a bid to address the ubiquitous problem of organ shortages.

- See more at: http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/no-monkey-business-baboons-with-pig-hearts-survive-for-two-years/11828#sthash.c80TvbIm.dpuf

In events which seem copied from the script of a B-grade potboiler, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has, at the age of 60, just discovered that he is not who he thought he was. After taking a DNA test to disprove rumours that he was not his father's son, he learned that the rumours were true. His real father was the last private secretary of Wnston Churchill, Sir Anthony Montague Browne.

Despite his deep religious faith, the Archbishop seems quite shaken by the news. He surmounted a difficult childhood with alcoholic parents to become a successful oil executive and then an Anglican priest. He had no idea that the ne'er-do-well whom he regarded as his estranged father was not. In an interview with The Telegraph [London] he said:

“My own experience is typical of many people. To find that one’s father is other than imagined is fairly frequent. To be the child of families with great difficulties in relationships, with substance abuse or other matters, is far too normal.

“Although there are elements of sadness, and even tragedy in my father’s case, this is a story of redemption and hope from a place of tumultuous difficulty and near despair in several lives ... I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes.”

Although this is just an anecdote, it confirms what I've always regarded as one of the most important principles in contemporary bioethics: that every child deserves to know his or her biological parents. Archbishop Welby is better prepared than most to survive a personal earthquake like this, but it is an earthquake. To know who we are, to have a secure personal identity, is an important dimension of our autonomy.