Oink Oink! : How pigs can be our top organ donors!

Let’s paint a bizarre scenario, like the millions of Americans with defective and diseased hearts; you are on the waiting list to receive brand new heart valves. Every year, there are only about 2,000 human hearts available to donate to an approximately 3,000 patient waiting list. If there was a radical alternative, let’s say along the lines of supplying you with a healthy pig heart tissue as a donor, would you take that chance? Interspecies transplant has become increasingly popular as the demand for organ donation increases. In Emily Anthes’ “Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts,” Anthes vividly describes the whole revolutionary idea of surgically transplanting viable organ tissue from an animal species to a human. This type of experimentation is called “xenographing” and has the whole scientific community ecstatic with the possibilities!

            However, xenographing is not as easy as it sounds. Our body, specifically our immune system, is designed to reject any foreign tissue which creates a dilemma in this amazing discovery. However, the organ tissue from pigs is surprisingly very similar in composition and size to humans. Experiments have been conducted in which surgeons replace damaged heart valve tissue in humans with that of pigs. With the aid of specific preservatives, our bodies are tricked into thinking that the foreign tissue is actually ours!

            It is now very common for surgeons to use xenographing to extract viable piggy tissue for ourselves, but the science community has been very busy! Another detrimental health problem that plagues our society, Diabetes, is currently being tackled by scientists and physicians at Northwestern Medicine. Scientists are currently working on transplanting insulin-producing cells (called “islets”) for people suffering with type I Diabetes.  Once again, our swine friends come to our rescue. Pigs produce insulin that controls blood sugar in a similar manner that humans do. Amazingly enough, Northwestern scientists have conducted this interspecies transplant of cells without the aid of drugs that suppress the immune system. In other words, these pig islets could be transplanted in our bodies and our immune system wouldn’t even detect them as foreign, they wouldn’t be rejected! Similar to heart tissue, there aren’t many human donations of islets which the public desperately needs. By perfecting the transplant of pig islets, type I of Diabetes could be gradually controlled and treated.

            Interspecies transplant is a gradually growing field. Discoveries such as the compatible heart valve tissue and the pig islets lay the foundation for future experiments in hopes that one day it could be plausible for the transplantation of entire animal organs to save waiting patients. 

Sources:

Anthes, Emily. Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New     
     Beasts. New York: Scientific American. 2013. Print.

Northwestern University. "Interspecies transplant works in first step for new diabetes therapy."ScienceDaily, 12      Jul. 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 2013.