A 56-year-old man with liver failure has become the first living person to be surgically connected to a genetically modified pig liver, say the team that conducted the surgery. The pig organ filtered the man’s blood for a few days while he waited for a human liver transplant, they say.
Man now oiks, but remains stable.
But the pig didn’t make it I’m assuming?
Pig was an alcoholic anyway.
nah they used a genetically altered human liver to keep the pig alive. no worries
but I don’t know why, she swallowed the fly.
Dammit. For 1/2 a second I believed it, the thought process was: “oh that is really neat that they did … waitafukinminute.”
😭
Why hasn’t there been news of progress in the ‘organ skeleton’ technique where they denude a donor organ of all cells other than its collagen frame, then re-seed it with good stem cells for the same organ tissue from the same person? (I saw an article about doing this with hearts; no idea if all major organs have such a scaffolding which could be used…)
There were articles a few years ago about this promising technique – it could enable new organs without all of the issues of rejection if it could be perfected.
Imagine if everyone (not just the rich) could get healthy core organ cells taken in their youth, banked, and then used later if required to re-grow a failing organ.
That is pure science fiction.
This is practical gene editing of a pig to make it immunogenically more human. They knocked out three major pig proteins and knocked in three human proteins,
All major organs do have a “skeleton”, however that itself can be immunogenic and there are still issues with differentiation of the stem cells into the correct proportion and locations. If people wanted scientific advances faster we’d put a lot more money in.
Banking of tissues is unlikely to occur at scale without cheaper and more reliable refridgeration. Ultra low temp freezers are not cheap to run and reliability is costly.
You can’t freeze tissues and reuse them.
It’s a weird case, but I know there’s one company working on it to regrow foreskins for guys who wish they hadn’t been circumcised.
They’re making progress, but still probably a few years out, and I feel like that kind of says a lot why you haven’t seen news about it- it’s just not there yet. I’m pretty sure a liver is lot more complex than a foreskin, so if we can’t even manage that yet a liver is still a long way off.
The way this kind of research goes kind of tends to have a lot of plateaus, lots of researchers working on it and not making much progress until someone has a major breakthrough, then it plateaus again until the next big thing. Sometimes those breakthroughs lead to something actually deliverable as a treatment/procedure/product, other times it’s just a stepping stone to get to the next one.
It’s a weird case, but I know there’s one company working on it to regrow foreskins for guys who wish they hadn’t been circumcised.
They’re making progress, but still probably a few years out
they have successfully made a wallet from the tissue, but if you rub it it turns into a set of luggage.
The foreskin research is just the tip of the spear for this promising, if sensitive, area. Even if they make errors and have to retract, there’s nothing stopping what’s coming.
5/7
