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Success for pig-to-baboon heart transplants

A modified protocol has enabled baboons that received transplanted pig hearts to survive for more than six months. This improvement on previous efforts brings pig-to-human heart transplants a step closer.
  1. Christoph Knosalla

    1. Christoph Knosalla is in the Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery, German Heart Center Berlin, 13353 Berlin, Germany, and at the DZHK (German Centre for Cardiovascular Research), Partner Site Berlin, Berlin.

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Heart failure, in which the heart cannot pump blood around the body efficiently, is a problem of epic proportions. The number of adults living with heart failure in the United States is expected1 to reach more than 8 million by 2030, and many of these people will die while waiting for a donor organ2,3. One possible solution to this shortage is to use hearts from pig donors instead of from humans. But, so far, monkeys given transplanted pig hearts have not survived long-term, and so this approach has been deemed too risky to test in humans. Writing in Nature, Längin et al.4 report modifications to a cross-species transplantation (xenotransplantation) approach that, for the first time, has enabled baboons that received genetically modified pig hearts to survive for more than six months.

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Nature 564, 352-353 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07419-5

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