Xenotransplantation: this is the name given to interventions to transplant tissues or organs from specimens of one species to those of a different one. Although always looking for them to be as close as possible, to avoid rejection of the transplanted organ.
Now a team from the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich in Germany has achieved unprecedented success in this field. They have managed to make a baboon survive six months with the heart of a pig.
Previously, rhesus monkeys had been able to live for more than 400 days with pig kidneys. And it had also been achieved that specimens of baboons that had their own heart working, survived more than 900 days after a second heart, of pig origin, was implanted.
But in the case of these primates, it must be taken into account that this second heart was not essential for their life. That is the difference with respect to this new experiment, in which a baboon was able to live 182 days, working only with the transplanted heart of a pig.
The researchers also managed to get three other baboons to live for three months after a similar transplant. In fact, four of the six specimens that participated in the experiment survived.
The medical community recognizes that the success of the experiment is spectacular, although it is still necessary to go beyond the limit of ten live specimens, before the possibility of conducting a similar experiment with human patients begins to be considered.
Source: Nature.