In 1964, Dr. James Hardy decided to run a groundbreaking surgical experiment; he decided to run a heart transplant on a 60-year-old man. The donor? A chimpanzee.
The heart functioned for around one hour before being rejected by the subject. While this surgery wasn’t as successful as hoped, it was the first of its kind and an inspiration for future animal-to-human transplants. Inevitably, this medical experimentation has been attempted over and over again for decades with little hope, until recently, where it had its first taste of success. Believe it or not, animal-to-human transplants have been proven a feasible and lifesaving procedure for the future. Meaning, one day we could have animal organs in our bodies.
According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, there were over 42,000 organ transplants completed in 2022. While this number may seem substantial, there are over 114,000 patients on national organ transplant waiting lists. Thousands of people die before receiving their organs which is why the need for organs is ever so high.
This led to the experimentation of transplanting organs or tissue from one species to another, otherwise known as xenotransplantation.
While many doctors have been attempting xenotransplantation for many decades, the list of success stories is quite short. Usually due to humans rejecting the organ. The constant failed attempts provided little hope for many scientists. In fact, Dcotor Joe Leventhal, the head of the kidney transplant program at Northwestern, describes this advancement as “It’s just around the corner. The problem is, it’s a very, very, very long corner.”
Despite the many failed attempts, scientists have been able to realize their errors and the reasoning behind the fast rejection in human bodies. This realization led the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Surgeons to reattempt xenotransplantation in 2022, using a gene-edited pig heart on a human. The pig’s genes were changed to human genes that allowed the body to accept the organ. The results were found quite successful, as it was tested on David Bennett, a fifty-seven-year-old man who needed a heart transplant. Bennett’s body accepted the organ and he lived two long, conscious months with the new heart before his unfortunate death. Though the cause of his death were unclear, he exhibited signs of declining health and heart failure. This groundbreaking experiment set a new milestone and proved that xenotransplantation can effectively work for longer periods of time.
Consequently, this led to NYU Langone trying pig-to-human transplants on two other brain-dead patients who lived around 72 hours before being unplugged from ventilation. From this, they set plans for future clinical trials, in hopes to be a replacement for human organs.
Every day around 17 people on the organ waiting list die: making the dire need for organs higher than ever, but there is progression to a solution. Ultimately, the use of animal organs in humans was once deemed as an unrealistic idea, but now is serving as proof that a little innovation could be what changes the world, or even better, saving lives.
