Friday, November 16, 2018

Xenotransplants: the (evergreen) promise of transplantable organs from pigs

Wouldn't it be great if the shortage of transplantable organs could be fixed by figuring out how to grow them in farm animals? (Yes, that would raise a bunch of issues of its own, but so does meat eating...)

The NY Times has the story of how that might be closer than it has been in the past:
20 AMERICANS DIE EACH DAY WAITING FOR ORGANS. CAN PIGS SAVE THEM?
THANKS TO GENETICALLY ENGINEERED PIGS, THE DONOR-ORGAN SHORTAGE COULD SOON BE A THING OF THE PAST.


It includes lots of promising news, and this observation:
“The joke about xenotransplantation is that it’s always just around the corner, and it always will be,” says Parsia Vagefi, the chief of surgical transplantation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “But recent progress has been so remarkable that for first time it feels like we’re on the verge of a definitive solution to the organ crisis.”
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And of course, note that many more than 20 Americans die each day due to a shortage of organs:

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

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