Eva Ruiz I Sevilla, (EFE).- The existence of tools that allow “copying and pasting genes as if they were a text” paves the way for what may be “the easiest way” to advance in the transplantation of organs from animals to humans, an option that could mark the future of this field.
This type of technique, called “xenotransplantation”, could be available in clinical practice over the next decade, as revealed in the recent congress of the Andalusian Society for Organ and Tissue Transplantation (SATOT) has held in Seville.
Its president and section chief of the Renal and Pancreas Transplant Unit of the Reina Sofía University Hospital in Córdoba, Dr. Alberto Rodríguez-Benot, explained to EFE that these tools already exist that “allow us to cut pieces that we don’t like and put new ones that they do want them to be there.”
“If we have a pig and its organ expresses something that my body is going to consider harmful or is going to injure it, I remove it so that when that organ is implanted I don’t reject it and I don’t consider it strange,” he gives as an example.
Pigs and primates, the most similar to humans
During this congress, the presentation by Dr. Robert A. Montgomery, an American surgeon who explained how he carried out in 2021 the first kidney transplant to a human being from a pig, the animal that, together with primates, is most similar, was addressed. the human in the design of its vital organs.
Rodríguez-Benot indicates that the main problem when using xenotransplantation is “a very important immunological barrier” that separates both species. “Upon receiving any animal tissue, the human body immediately rejected it”, something that was detected from the first experimental programs, the doctor specifies.
Despite this, “the idea was never abandoned” and what has been done is to “evolve in the available tools”, until today new techniques such as cell and molecular biology allow “copying and pasting genes as if they were a text ”.
“At the end of the day, they are a series of bases and units that are one after the other”, details the doctor, who adds that there are cases in which “six genes have been removed and four new ones put in to make the an organ that is most similar to a human and that once implanted is not rejected and is functional”.
Older donors
This may be, in his opinion, “the easiest way to advance in the future in transplantation”, even with the limit of the availability of this type of organ, which “is dependent on certain companies” that up to now They only exist in the United States and that “they are private and not a public research system.”
Rodríguez-Benot highlights the importance of these advances at a time when the profile of the donor has changed, since they have gone from being a young person who died by chance -usually in a traffic accident- to people in their 60s who die from a cardiovascular problem.
“Young people who need an organ have fewer and fewer donors,” says the president of SATOT, who recalls that “donor and recipient must be as similar as possible” and stresses that this creates “a need for organs that is very difficult to supply, because without donors there is no transplant”.
Remember that there is still a family refusal to donate 15% in the country as a whole, something that he attributes to “a false concept of not wanting to touch the person who dies” and a “relatively low” rate, although the objective and “main challenge” is that this percentage is close to 0%.
More visibility campaigns
Therefore, it is committed to making visible that “donating generates life and hope” in people who are condemned by an irreversible chronic disease and “have to live together with a dialysis machine or an oxygen bottle”, with which it can be achieved ” improve their quality of life.”
Rodríguez-Benot has highlighted, however, that Spain is the leader in organ donation from deceased patients and adds that donors “in asystole” are gaining more and more ground, with 40% of those in the last year.
These are people who, being in a hospital, their hearts stop and die, so their organs stop receiving blood and oxygen. For the correct extraction of the same, a machine called ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, for its acronym in English) is placed, which acts as an “artificial heart”.
“This has made it possible to increase the rate of transplants in our country in recent years, since, previously, these people were not candidates to be donors,” explains the doctor, who points out that Andalusia is “at the forefront” of Spain, with 49 donors per million inhabitants compared to 46 nationals. EFE