In the near future, pigs may be providing humans with more than just delicious breakfast meats. An experiment conducted by the US National Institute of Health has been able to keep a Baboon with a pig's heart alive for three years. This success could pave the way for using pig hearts for human heart transplants.
Xenotransplantation- using animal organs in humans- is becoming an increasingly attractive option for the medical community as the need for transplants continue to rise.
“It has long been a hope or dream of many scientists, that somehow they could use animal organs as alternatives to human ones, as we don’t have enough human ones because people won’t donate their organs and partly because the demand has been going up so fast,” said medical ethicist Art Caplan on Boston Public Radio Wednesday.
Although Baboons and monkeys may be genetically similar to humans, their organs are too small for adult bodies, says Caplan. Pig organs are closer in size to the average human organ, thus making them a perfect fit for xenotransplantation. If this practice did become popular, would it be moral to raise pigs solely for the purpose of harvesting their organs?
“My answer to that is, well it’s an issue, but it would be better than taking up pigs for breakfast,” said Caplan. “I have no objections to saying that humans are morally more important than animals, so I would make that trade off.”
In addition to the moral concerns, there are serious medical hurdles to overcome for a human body to successfully accept animal organs. “Animal parts don’t go well in humans. If you put foreign tissue into the bloodstream it gets attacked by our immune antibody system,” said Caplan. The NIH used immunosuppression medication with the Baboon, that helped the animal's immune system to not reject the pig heart. Caplan believes that the same technique could be used on humans.
Furthermore, using gene editing to rewire a pig's immune system to more closely resemble a human's would lower the risk factor. "If that works out, I think we are going to see animal transplants take up some of the supply slack," said Caplan.
