A selection of news we missed during August. Reuters reports on the controversy surrounding horses edited by Kheiron Biotech to enhance their muscles. In Argentina, veterinary reproductive technologies are cutting-edge, and the use of cloning in horse breeding is accepted. Still, for now, genetically edited animals are not allowed to compete in polo.
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There is still no consensus on the best way to humanize pig organs, but recent progress has convinced the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to greenlight the first clinical trial.
The trial will begin enrolling six participants, and could expand to 44 if early results are promising. A six-month survival after the xenotransplant will be considered a success indicator, although it’s unclear how many patients will need to reach this milestone to win the agency’s approval.
Continue readingWe shared her story when Towana Looney broke the 60-day record with a xeno-organ. A month has passed since then; check out what she says in this inspiring video from NYU Langone Health.
The other xenograft patients arrived at the operating theatre in critical condition, which likely contributed to why none of them survived beyond two months. Towana Looney, however, was in better health when she received the pig kidney edited to reduce the risk of rejection. She benefited from the insights gained from earlier attempts and, on January 25, celebrated a record sixty days with an animal organ. She is the first patient to receive a kidney from a pig with 10 genetic modifications and is currently the only person in the world living with a pig organ.
Specialists around the world await updates from China on the first man to receive a gene-edited pig liver. In the meantime, the last pig kidney transplanted in the United States has already stopped working and been removed, returning the patient to dialysis. And before her, three other U.S. patients had survived only a few weeks after surgery involving either heart or kidney. However, it would be wrong to conclude that xenotransplantations are falling short of expectations: the individual interventions authorized under compassionate care have taught physicians and researchers useful lessons ahead of the first clinical trials that the Food and Drug Administration may authorize in the coming years. Let’s keep our fingers crossed as we wait for the well-deserved happy ending.
Richard Slayman passed away on May 11, we will come back to this news as soon as the cause of death is clarified.
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David Bennett, the first patient transplanted with a genetically edited pig heart, died on March 8 last year, two months after the surgery, presumably from a latent pig virus (a problem that does not seem hard to solve with more stringent protocols and screening, as Linda Scobie explained to me a few months ago). Since then, experimental transplants have continued in brain-dead patients who had donated their bodies to research. After xenokidneys with a single genetic modification transplanted in late 2021, in the summer of 2022 it was the turn of ten edits xenohearts. The state of the art now is that the potential of the approach still appears high, as does the morale of specialists.
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As you probably know, the first patient with a pig heart died two months after the transplant surgery. You probably heard also that a porcine cytomegalovirus (PCMV) may have contributed to the death. However, if you are still wondering how bad is the news for the future of xentransplantation, Linda Scobie from Glasgow Caledonian University is the one to listen to. She leads a research group interested in viral zoonoses in the context of novel technologies such as xenotransplantation, and the contribution and/or reactivation of viruses in chronic disease conditions. Professor Scobie is a member of the World Health Organisation committee for the global consultation on regulatory requirements for xenotransplantation trials. I reached her by email for a feature just published in Le Scienze, the Italian edition of Scientific American. Below you can read her answers.
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The first paper on a CRISPR xenotransplant is out in the American Journal of Transplantation. It’s about two swine kidneys with 10 modified genes transplanted into a dead brain man as a proof of concept. The surgery was performed on September 30 by Jayme Locke and colleagues from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
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As you probably know, on January 7 at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore a 57 years old man named David Bennett became the first human to have his heart replaced with that of a CRISPRed pig. But what does make a xenoheart suitable for transplantation?
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CRISPeR FRENZY 