By Staff Writer (media@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Aug 13, 2015 08:29 AM EDT

In the future, human beings may benefit from organ transplants from pigs. A genetically modified pig may provide people with a liver, kidney or heart.

In a study published in the journal, Xenotranplantation, scientists from the University of Pittsburg and a number of research institutions worldwide tried transplanting a pig kidney into a baboon. The kidney transplant was successful for 136 days. Another pig-to-baboon transplant, this time involving the former’s heart, kept the baboon alive for 936 days. The DNA of the pigs was spliced with some traces of human DNA to reduce the chances of organ donation rejection. Revivcor genetically modified the pigs for the study. The next objective in the following years is to test how the same approach would work on humans. A lung pig-to-human transplant is being considered. Ultimately, the scientists aim to find a non-human source for human organ transplants with minimal rejection cases.

“We want to make organs come off the assembly line, a dozen per day,” Martine Rothblatt, United Therapeutics founder and co-CEO, told MIT Technology Review. David Ayares, a researcher and co-founder of Revivcor discovered an approach to suppress a kind of sugar in the pigs that was initiating an immediate rejection response among human recipients. Pigs have become potential candidates as organ donors because of their wide availability and physical functions that resemble that of humans. For one, pigs have their own protein that prevents blood clots, which would be the counterpart of thrombomodulin in humans.

“We are adding the human genes to the pig so you have the organ repressing the immune response, rather than have to give a whopping dose of immune suppressants,” saidAyares.

By 2016, they will introduce more human genes to the pigs, with some having as many as eight. As a result, the genetic changes will make their organs more compatible with a human body, and reduce the chances of organ rejection. The pigs will look the same.

Based on the same MIT Technology Review article, there are several challenges to the team’s overall goal. Sean Stevens, part of Synthetic Genomics’ mammalian synthetic program, said that while they solve one rejection issue, another would surface. It is an iterative process, which may require several trials and alterations. The successful transplant between a pig and a primate was deemed as a major breakthrough and gives hope that cardiac xenotransplantation can actually work. However, people should not expect the technology to be available anytime soon.

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