Surgeons externally attached a pig liver to a brain-dead human body and watched it successfully filter blood, a step toward eventually trying the technique in patients with liver failure.
The University of Pennsylvania announced the novel experiment Thursday, a different spin on animal-to-human organ transplants. In this case, the pig liver was used outside the donated body, not inside — a way to create a “bridge” to support failing livers by doing the organ’s blood-cleansing work externally, much like dialysis for failing kidneys.
Animal-to-human transplants, called xenotransplants, have failed for decades because people’s immune systems rejected the foreign tissue. Now scientists are trying again with pigs whose organs have been genetically modified to be more humanlike.
In the Penn experiment, researchers attached a liver from a pig — one genetically modified by eGenesis — to a device made by OrganOx that usually helps preserve donated human livers before transplant.
The family of the deceased, whose organs weren’t suitable for donation, offered the body for the research. Machines kept the body’s blood circulating.
There’s lots of work into developing liver dialysis-like machines, and experiments using pig livers were tried years ago — before today’s more advanced genetic techniques, said Dr. Parsia Vagefi of UT Southwestern Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the new experiment but is closely watching xenotransplantation research.
“I applaud them for pushing this forward,” Vagefi said, calling this combination pig-device approach an intriguing step in efforts toward better care for liver failur
