The Future of Transplantation

Since 1902, animals have been studied and occasionally used as sources of organs for transplantation, usually when human organs were unavailable. Clinical organ xenotransplantation invariably failed, whereas clinical organ allotransplantation rose to become a primary treatment for failure of the heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs. Still, a shortage of human organs has limited organ transplantation and motivates ongoing efforts to advance xenotransplantation into clinical practice. Griffith and colleagues(1) now report in the Journal the transplantation of a heart from a pig into a patient who had severe cardiac failure. The pig was genetically engineered to disrupt certain genes, including those . . .