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Medicine Science

Genetically Engineered Pig Hearts Transplanted Into Dead People (theverge.com) 40

Posted by BeauHD from the learning-experience dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Researchers successfully transplanted genetically modified pig hearts into two recently deceased people connected to ventilators, the New York University team announced today. The surgeries are the latest step forward in the field of animal-to-human transplants, or xenotransplantation, which has seen a flurry of successes so far this year -- raising hopes for a new, steady supply of organs to ease shortages. The only thing different about these heart transplants from a normal human-to-human heart transplant was the organ itself, the research team said in a statement.

The team performed the transplants on June 16th and July 9th, and each recipient was monitored for three days. In that time, the hearts functioned normally, and there weren't signs of rejection from the recipients, who were connected to ventilators to keep their body processes functioning semi-regularly, even after death. The two recipients were not able to be organ donors but were able to participate in whole-body donation for this type of research. The two pig hearts came from biotechnology company Revivicor, which produces genetically modified pigs (and also funded the research). The pigs had 10 genetic modifications -- four to block pig genes and prevent rejection and six to add human genes. A living person was successfully given a pig heart in early January, notes the report. While the person responded well to the transplant initially, they died of heart failure in March.

"The specific cause is still unknown, but infection with a pig virus may have contributed to his death," adds The Verge. "The pig hearts are supposed to be free of viruses, but experts say they can be hard to detect." A research paper in late June details everything that went wrong with the transplant.
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Genetically Engineered Pig Hearts Transplanted Into Dead People More

Genetically Engineered Pig Hearts Transplanted Into Dead People

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  • This Is How We Get Zombies (Score:3)

    by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @10:46PM (#62698680)

    Guess we have to cut their hearts out instead of cutting off their heads.

  • Used to be we can cure mice of anything. Now we can cure dead people of anything.

    • Well, this should certainly improve the operation's numbers on sudden death.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well, either that, or quit taking the clot shot. You're going to be brain dead in 5-10 years from the prions anyway.

  • "Yes, I saw. You were doing well until everyone died."

  • Pretty good plot (Score:3)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @01:09AM (#62698828)

    If you think about it zombies created by implanting pig hearts into the dead explains why zombies want to eat humans, just like a pen of pigs will devour an entire human body so too will Pig Heart Zombies (PHZ). Very nice!

  • Why are they hard to detect? (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @03:35AM (#62698988) Homepage Journal

    The use of microarrays for rapidly identifying viruses and bacteria was, originally, one of the major reasons for developing these chips. It was intended that doctors could diagnose rapidly (as in under an hour) from a range of illnesses with nothing more than a blood sample, by seeing if there were any matches. If the illness was on the menu of standard illnesses, the diagnosis would be returned inside of an hour.

    That's what we were all sold and it hasn't happened yet. Which is annoying.

    But we can use the same idea here. We could have a chip with a menu of common pig viruses and test hundreds of pig hearts in a single run for all of them. Again, this aught to be on the timescale of hours. You could test pig hearts from even mega abatoirs in real time. Hell, you could equip vets with the chips and scan the pigs in bulk on the farms, allowing antivirals to be used to clear up the viruses before the hearts are harvested.

    If microarrays are as good as we keep being told, there's nothing to stop this from happening. The tech isn't as cheap as originally intended, but if you're talking about testing hundreds of hearts at a time, you're talking about the ability to perform hundreds of additional heart operations per day, but also boosting the yields (and reducing vet costs) for farmers. The sheer amount of proft we're talking in a single quarter should utterly swamp the cost of producing rapid tests that can spot these difficult-to-spot viruses.

    So we're down to the only three possible objections - firstly, that microarrays AREN'T as good as we were told in the early days (which is always possible) at spotting a wide menu of viruses, secondly that microarrays AREN'T as good as we were told when the viral load in a sample is small, and finally that the pig viruses that are the biggest problem are going to hide in ways that means they're not in the blood for the tests to detect.

    (Analogue chemical tests, such as the kits used for covid, require a relatively high viral load, which is why they don't spot the virus for the first couple of days. They're also impractical if you're wanting to look for dozens or hundreds of different viruses, as you'd need to conduct as many independent tests as there are viruses to look for. The tests are also single-use. The chips suppposedly can detect the lot in a single test and are supposedly very sensitive.)

    I would have to assume that one or more of the objections is indeed valid, OR that pharmaceutical companies aren't willing to put in the initial investment required - which would be high - because they can't produce antivirals for pig viruses AND don't believe there would be enough healthy hearts without intervention to be able to cover the costs. (They'll certainly want to cover costs, but can reasonably also ask if there's a value in a diagnostic test nobody can make use of.)

    • If microarrays are as good as we keep being told, there's nothing to stop this from happening.

      There is also a cultural problem. Hospitals have gold standard techniques (cell culture, DNA extraction) and the cost is well controlled (the trained technician). Introducing completely new tech (microarrays) means possibly a new set of problems, maybe liability issues, uncertainty regarding evolution of cost (depends on the silicon industry hence scary chip shortage comes in).

      I have read a story of a microarray startup that was purchased by a big name that then retired the tech. Tech was working, but the c

    • How do you find viruses when there are orders of magnitude more viruses than nearly all scientists imagined? https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]

      With a limited search they found 9 novel coronaviruses and 300 hepatitis viruses. They intend to improve their search and expect to find 100,000,000 new viruses in the next decade

      A team of scientists are saying (as of last year) we don't know jack about viruses. Much less than we thought we knew. Then, to throw an even bigger monkey wrench into the works- there's HERV

      • How do you find viruses when there are orders of magnitude more viruses than nearly all scientists imagined?

        The answer is you can do exactly what they did in the publication you cite: Massive parallel sequencing. But it's expensive and requires specialised scientists.

        Parent Post says they could screen for the 100 most common viruses with an inexpensive test. The pigs raised for organ harvest should be in a clean pen, eating processed food served by people in a lab coat, so unlikely to catch exotic viruses. Doctors were surprised to find a virus in the pig organ and confused about how it got there.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          The thing is, although pigs are notorious virus incubators, you don't need to initially identify anything more than the general family and 100 families may constitute millions of varieties of virus. Remember, microarrays don't need to detect perfect matches. That's why 23&Me uses them for uber-cheap genotyping. They don't need a perfect match for each customer, they only need to know what human DNA looks like in general and look for things that mostly match.

          You also don't need to know about any virus fo

          • I don't see why you're throwing straw men and fantasy scenarios at this.

            I'm not, I agree with you that it's possible, worth to do, and less expensive. Summarizing the argument: one commenter criticized that your suggestion (microarrays) is impossible because there are way too many unknown viruses, and cited a publication that used sequencing in wildlife. I replied that while in principle one could also use sequencing for an exhaustive search of the organ-donor pigs, but in practice it's not required to do because these pigs are not in the wild and they have no way to catch unco

  • Are the people going to be OK? ;)

  • I welcome our new Pig-human overlords! (Score:3)

    by Lady Galadriel ( 4942909 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @11:24AM (#62699808)
    Everyone welcome our new Pig-human overlords!


    Oh, wait, isn't congress and Washington D.C. full of such people already?

  • Yet another incentive to declare living people as dead, and pull the plug but without pulling the plug. "But it's for science." More pressure on crying family.

  • Is this the same lab where they developed Lechonk?

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