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Pig lung transplanted into a human
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoTL;DR: NO, you won't be getting a pig lung anytime soon. >However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant. Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment. The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients. Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course.
- piombisallow 1y agoFirst heart transplant lived for 18 days post-op, it has to start somewhere.
- hallole 1y agoThat alone is insane, incredible. Hardly measures up to the ideal of leaving the hospital, good as new, but putting that aside: 18 days on a transplant, trans-species organ? I'm in awe!
- daniel_iversen 1y agoThere’s a lot of work going on to try and modify the DNA of the pigs to make them “transplant-compatible” using CRISPR, avoiding rejection and lifelong medication for the patient etc; https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan4187 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan4187
- bitwize 1y ago[flagged]
- omnicognate 1y agoI'd take it over dying. (Not that this technology is actually at a stage where it could prevent that, but neither are whole 3D printed lungs.)
- superb_dev 1y agoThen you’ll need to wait
- codersfocus 1y ago3d printing is not the approach that will yield organs. My money is on the work Michael Levin is doing on bioelectronics, where you essentially “command” (/convince) cells to turn into the organ you need by talking with them in cellular electronic language.
- rzzzt 1y agoMy mind-reading senses tell me parent might be thinking about the scaffolding approach where you show cells the vague outlines of a lung or heart in the form of an extracellular matrix and then they go "hmm, we are building a heart then".
- AndrewDavis 1y agoIf I remember correctly you need both. Program the cells to be X organ cells, and provide a scaffold for them to grow on.
- whimsicalism 1y agothat seems like a way harder problem than convincing your body not to kill the pig organ
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoWell yeah, but it's plausible that this is easier to get working. If we can get animal organs working, then we can save lives while we figure out how to print/clone human organs.
- hsnewman 1y agoSeinfield had an episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALpcxliWLeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALpcxliWLeI
- pepy 1y agoPigman!
- k__ 1y agoWould it be considered haram even if you don't actually eat it?
- Vosporos 1y ago> He has only forbidden you ˹to eat˺ carrion, blood, swine[1], and what is slaughtered in the name of any other than Allah. But if someone is compelled by necessity—neither driven by desire nor exceeding immediate need—they will not be sinful. Surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful. [1]: Eating pork is forbidden in the Old Testament in Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8. https://quran.com/2?startingVerse=173 https://quran.com/2?startingVerse=173
- EA-3167 1y agoOn the Jewish side of things there's a principle called "Pikuach Nefesh" which essentially means that outside of extremes like murder, rape, and other violent crimes against others, you should do anything possible to preserve life. If you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath and help.
- fsckboy 1y ago>if you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath are you therefore required to answer the phone, because who else would be calling on shabat?
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agono, but if you have a pager, you would.
- adriand 1y agoA friend of mine lives in Montreal where there is a large orthodox Jewish population and he told me he was out walking one day and a woman started calling to him from the door of her house and gesturing for him to come over. She explained to him that she needed his help: there was an urgent situation and she needed to make a phone call, but because it was the Sabbath, she was not able to. He made the call for her and went on his way. I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?
- chaostheory 1y agoThe danger of xeonozoonsis outweighs the benefits of cross species organ transplants for humans
- kyykky 1y agoPerhaps you then consider donating your kidney?
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoThis is about lungs?
- tialaramex 1y agoIt is easier to agree to donate your lungs because ethically they're only going to take your lungs if you die. So then you don't care anyway. If you agree to donate a kidney they may ask when you're alive, because you have two kidneys and you can survive (though with some reduction in capability) with just one. This is called Living Kidney Donation, you don't have to offer to do this, and even if you offer, and it's a match you don't have to go through with the donation but obviously there are huge psychological impacts from deciding to perhaps save somebody's life as a conscious choice at a non-negligible risk to your own.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y agoNote that you're not "saving somebody's life" by donating a kidney. What you are doing, at best, is increasing their quality of life and even that is hard to quantify: Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease. There are also risks, including the risks of surgery. After the transplant, you will need to take anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, for as long as your new kidney is working, which can have side effects. You will have a higher risk for infections and certain types of cancer. Although most transplants are successful and last for many years, how long they last can vary from one person to the next. Depending on your age, many people will need more than one kidney transplant during a lifetime. https://www.kidney.org/kidney-topics/kidney-transplant https://www.kidney.org/kidney-topics/kidney-transplant The majority of kidney patients with end-stage kidney disease do not simply die: they can survive several years on dialysis. As far as I can tell, most indeed do: only a minority of kidney patients ever get transplants. Source: relative with kidney disease who would not accept a living donour kidney because of ethical concerns.
- deadbabe 1y agoI’d love a hard sci-fi story where they implant chunks of pig brain into brain damaged humans, trying to maintain as much “life context” but bringing in new brain matter to help them function again.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI think our neurons are actually different in significant ways, might be more accurate and interesting for them to use brain organoids.
- sho_hn 1y agoStar Trek went into this a bit. There was an episode in which the technology behind the android Data's artificial brain had been turned into a medical treatment used to prolong the life of a recurring character who got injured, and the ethical question of the subplot was roughly "how much of their brain can you subsitute with functional but essentially generic hardware before they cease to be themselves, making the rescue attempt fruitless". Most people will probably not remember this - it was the death of Kira's lover Bareil on DS9 - because it was almost throwaway, but it was one of those sparkling little ideas and questions Star Trek used to be filled with that has stayed with me life-long.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- soulofmischief 1y agoA great take on the Ship of Theseus.
- dekhn 1y agoNot exactly what you asked for, but Alastair Reynolds have books with "hyperpigs" that are part-pig, part-human, likely bred to be replacement parts for humans.
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoI've been reading his novels, and I like the story of the pigs. Genetically tweaked to be more compatible with the humans that might harvest their organs, but then they became a bit too human. Then scientists were like fuck it how far can we go with this. Hyperpigs. Scorpio is not as interesting a character as I would like, but he's a good pig.
- echelon 1y agoI can't imagine the red tape this research would have had to deal with in America. China is doing amazing work. Of course it failed, but it's one step in a long journey.
- kiba 1y agoThey had four different assessments and written permission from family plus a braindead patient. Red tape aplenty.
- whimsicalism 1y agoodd comment, the US is at the forefront of pig organ transplants?
- echelon 1y agoThere was no life saving here. This was performed in a brain dead person simply to determine the science outcomes. The brain dead person was used as a living experiment, and they were watching for immunological response. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have never read of this happening in the US. There's far too much red tape.
- n2d4 1y agoYou need to update your priors or assign less confidence to them. A pig heart transplant was completed (successfully) in the US a few years ago: https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2022/university-of-maryland-school-of-medicine-faculty-scientists-and-clinicians-perform-historic-first-successful-transplant-of-porcine-heart-into-adult-human-with-end-stage-heart-disease.html https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2022/university-of-...
- echelon 1y agoYou're not reading my comment. Go back and read it again. My entire point is that China is experimenting on BRAIN DEAD living bodies as test tubes. This is a way to accelerate much faster since there are far more brain dead patients and no effort needs to be made to keep the patient alive. They're effectively using these bodies as lab experiments. It's an incredibly smart move by China. Without the red tape and with an endless stream of brain dead bodies, they're going to leapfrog America quickly with this technology.
- Stevvo 1y agoI was thinking, big deal, didn't they do a pig heart transplant back in 1999? Turns out that was a popular children's novel and TV series in the UK called "Pig Heart Boy", not reality. First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 1y agoIt was tried earlier by Religa in 1987, but the experiment was a failure AFAIK.
- jmkni 1y agoHa this blew my mind, I was sure that this was real
- cblum 1y agoThis reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel. I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel. Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.
- bombcar 1y agoThere are a few docked cruise ships run as hotels, where they're so docked it would be hard to undock, but not run aground.
- echelon 1y ago> First actually pig heart transplant was in 2022. That patient died shortly thereafter. The condition is critical and there's a lot of immunological pressure put on the patient. China is smart to study this in living cadavers first. It's much easier to find patients that aren't already on death's door, and there is no need to keep the patient alive. You can run experiment after experiment.
- exhilaration 1y ago
- yahoozoo 1y agoDead in less than a year.
- kylecazar 1y ago9 days is definitely less than a year
- atleastoptimal 1y agoPorkin' Across America was prophetic
- becquerel 1y agoThat series messed me up when I was younger.
- lokrian 1y agoWhat happened to the 3d printed organs I was promised a decade ago?
- Frenchgeek 1y agoLow on cyan.
- stavros 1y agoBut I'm just printing black-and-white organs!
- numpad0 1y agoColor printers need color inks for tracking dots. Get a laser, they're clog free as a bonus. If your printer is already severely clogged and that is a major contributor to chronic ink level issues for your printer, apply few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto each of ink drawing ports(do NOT use acetone and/or ethanol; liquid form PFAS is better in narrow technical sense, IIRC). It will dissolve everything unwanted and its positive effects seem to last years, while being effectively harmless to electro-mechanical systems.
- spwa4 1y agoThey were kind of developed, and then abandoned due to governments saving on research (not because they didn't work). Or at least one kind was: "organoids" (which is a play on that they could be grown in any form, so some student decided to print a kind of alien-shaped almost-kidney, which then led to an article ... plus when used people want a flat relatively thin shape) They are extensively used in pharmacological research because they match real organs very well on the cellular level. But there is further research necessary to implement the large scale parts. E.g. in kidneys the actual kidney and the connection to the gall bladder forms separately and is then combined into an organ. That doesn't work, yet. And in some cases nobody has the courage to actually use it. The list of reasons why a liver organoid couldn't be implanted into a live patient is growing very thin. Well, aside from funding (which is massive if it fails, at least the equivalent of a year's pay. 3 or 4 times a year's pay for a doctoral student). I would like to point out that this research isn't especially badly treated. It has fared better than most programs. But it probably can't even be saved. The actual defunding happened 5 years ago and last year even the PI has moved on, and every doctoral student involved also has. I'm sure they'll answer questions on the subject if you ask, but you'll have to rebuild things from papers and email questions. There is a spinoff selling organoids to pharma, but tiny ones (think clusters of x0000 cells). If the research in scaling organoids to full sizes is restarted now, you can't really expect results the first year, maybe two at least. It isn't just the US that is defunding science.
- techterrier 1y agoah project Pigoon