With some genetic tinkering, a pig heart could substitute a human heart.
Just like his mom, Manvir Singh Birk could one day need a heart transplant. With the waiting list getting longer and a chronic shortage of donor organs, that life-changing surgery may take a long time to happen. But he says he’d undergo anything, as long as it keeps him alive – including living with a pig’s heart.
“It is freaky, but I wouldn’t really go so much with, ‘Oh, this is a bit weird. That’s not right.’ I’d go with more, ‘Okay, what’s the quickest fix? What’s going to get me better the quickest? What’s going to get me healthy the quickest? What’s going to get me the best quality of life that I can get?'” said Birk.
40 years ago this week, Sir Terence English performed the first successful heart transplant in the UK. Today, he feels this procedure is almost ready for a huge development.
“It’s likely that they will do a pig kidney transplant into a human within the next year probably, and if that works, it’ll be used in heart transplants and that’ll make a huge difference.”
English says he believes that’ll come into place within the next two to three years if it’s proven to work.
Transplants are the only long-term treatment for patients with terminal heart failure. But the lack of donor numbers fueled research into xenotransplantation techniques, where humans would be given organs from animals.
There are thousands of differences between pigs and humans, but there are also many similarities.
The makeup of pigs’ hearts and the way they function are similar to that of human hearts. In fact, porcine are already used as models for developing treatments.
The heart from a pig would be modified to hinder viruses that could infect humans through transplant. It can be extremely dangerous to patients, however. The body’s natural immune response is to reject the organ.
Questions will be raised about the ethics of humans living with pigs’ hearts. There will also be religious concerns for some patients. But despite the hurdles, this procedure even has the backing from the British Heart Foundation.
“The patients who are waiting for a transplant are critically ill. And if it’s shown to work, they will jump. They will have no problem about that because they know it’s the only option,” said English.
Thousands of people are in need of a heart transplant, and the demand for organs is on the rise. But these scientific developments show promise that pigs could save lives around the world.
