The US team appears to have tested the pig’s snout for the virus, but often it is lurking deeper in the tissues. Joachim Denner of the Institute of Virology at the Free University of Berlin, who led that study, says the solution to the problem is more accurate testing. UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND SCHOOL OF MEDICINE It “seems very likely the same may happen in humans,” they warned at the time. They think the virus could go haywire not just because the baboons’ immune systems were suppressed with drugs, but also because the pig immune system was no longer there to keep the virus in check. Those researchers said they found “astonishingly high” virus levels in pig hearts removed from baboons. Two years ago, for instance, German researchers reported that pig hearts transplanted into baboons lasted only a couple of weeks if the virus was present, while organs free from the infection could survive more than half a year. Instead, the problem is that pig cytomegalovirus is linked to reactions that can damage the organ and the patient-with catastrophic results. Fishman thinks there is “no real risk to humans” of its spreading further. However, the specific type of virus found in Bennett’s donor heart is not believed capable of infecting human cells, says Jay Fishman, a specialist in transplant infections at Massachusetts General Hospital. The concern could be serious enough to require lifelong monitoring for patients. Transferring pig viruses to humans has been a worry-some fear xenotransplantation could set off a pandemic if a virus were to adapt inside a patient’s body and then spread to doctors and nurses. Some surgeons think the latest gene-modified organs could in theory keep beating for years-and more rigorous procedures should be able to screen out the virus. If a pig virus played a role, it could mean a virus-free heart xenotransplant could last much longer. The detection of the pig virus in Bennett's heart is not necessarily all bad news for xenotransplantation. It likely contributed to the failure.” 10-gene pig Bennett have lived? We don’t know, but the infection didn’t help. That pig is supposed to be clean of all pig pathogens, and this is a significant one,” says Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis, a competing company that is also breeding pigs for transplant organs. The biotechnology company that raised and engineered the pigs, Revivicor, declined to comment and has made no public statement about the virus. But because the special pigs raised to provide organs are supposed to be virus-free, it now appears that the experiment was compromised by an unforced error. The heart swap in Maryland was a major test of xenotransplantation, the process of moving tissues between species. “We are beginning to learn why he passed on,” said Griffith, who believes that the virus “maybe was the actor, or could be the actor, that set this whole thing off.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |