
(Beth Clifton collage)
Will pig-to-human transplants cause farmers to grow hearts?

John F. Robins
Why breed pigs for meat when they can be bred for transplant?
This, to be sure, is a steeply discounted price. After PPL Therapeutics announced in 2000 that they had cloned five piglets, their shares jumped 19%, bringing the value of the company to over $130 million.
That made Alexis, Carrel, Christa, Dotcom and Millie, born at PPL’s laboratory in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA on March 5, 2000, worth around a cool $4.2 million apiece––nearly three times the estimated value of their descendant whose heart was transplanted into David Bennett, 57, on January 7, 2022 at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.
The pig-cloning scientific breakthrough back in 2000 put PPL Therapeutics way ahead of its competitors in the race to be first to create commercial quantities of pigs to supply organs and cells for transplant to humans. If they corner that market, the former division of PPL now doing business as Revivicor could be raking in around $10 billion a year––even selling pig hearts at the discounted rate.

(Beth Clifton collage)
Production issues
One technique is to de-activate a gene called alpha 1-3 gal transferase. This gene produces a sugar in pig cells which the human immune system recognizes and attacks, causing organ rejection. Once you turn off that gene, removing the sugars which identify a pig organ as a pig organ, the human immune system is less likely to attack the transplanted liver, kidney or heart. Coupled with tailor-made anti-rejection drugs, modified pigs could provide an endless supply of organs for transplant to humans.

(Beth Clifton collage)
Wastage

(Beth Clifton photo)
Sheep on a rooftop
The scientists suggested I was dafter than the sheep and spouting scaremongering nonsense.

(Beth Clifton collage)
Retroviruses sent the pig-cloning business to the U.S.
That ban on animal to human transplants is still in force in the U.K., but those set to make vast profits from such transplants are lobbying hard for permission to start clinical trials.
Companies have also moved their research out of the U.K. to other countries, such as the United States, where such strict controls are not in force.
At the hazard of again being called a scaremonger, I have to disagree that pig viruses present a risk only to individuals receiving pig organs. What scares me is that there already exist herds of pigs modified to make their tissues more like human tissue. These animals could be acting as incubators for new diseases to which humans have no resistance or medication.

(Beth Clifton collage)
Spillover risk
It would not take a transplant to transfer such diseases to humans. All it would take would be for a laboratory worker to pick up the illness from contact with the animals and then carry that illness home and into the wider community.
At the moment only a few relatively small herds of genetically modified pigs exist. Now that cloning these animals is a reality, along with transplanting their organs into humans there could be hundreds of large herds within just a few years. The risk of a potential new pandemic of lethal disease is about to multiply.

(Beth Clifton collage)
Not ten bucks a pound
Lack of ethical & political controls
Pig to human transplant experiments highlight the lack of ethical and political controls on research. Despite the risks to humans, and the fact that our public health services may never be able to afford these new procedures, scientists have been allowed to go ahead. Thousands of animals have suffered and died, yet all we currently have to show for it is the risk of a new disease.
Politicians should also suspend all xenotransplant research until the risks have been fully identified and the ethics of subjecting animals to the suffering involved in these dubious experiments is fully debated.

(Beth Clifton collage)
Not just animals at risk

(Beth & Merritt Clifton)
[John Robins’ guest column for ANIMALS 24-7, above, required surprisingly little updating from an earlier edition published by the Edinburgh Evening News on March 15, 2000.]
None so blind as those who will not see. Sharing, with gratitude, and a plethora of other thoughts and emotions, none of them positive.
In an earlier comment to Animals 24-7 this week, I referenced a book by the “medical thriller” author Robin Cook, MD, which includes a gene-editing farmed animal complex called the Farm Institute. Am now reading Cook’s book, “Death Benefit,” which features a research institute focused on learning to grow whole organs from stem cells derived from the recipient’s own body, thereby solving the immune-system’s rejection of a foreign organ. This accomplishment could conceivably eliminate the use of animals (mice mainly) for this particular purpose.
That would be great, but what is striking in virtually all of the coverage of these feats, whether in fiction or in real life, is the thrill and the pride people feel about the ability of science to do amazing, “impossible” things. This bedazzlement trumps all other emotions elicited by the experimental enterprise, regardless of who pays the price, or how steep.
“Death Benefit” makes me think also of how closely linked the project of growing whole organs for human recipients (organogenesis) resembles the current investment in growing animal muscle in laboratory vats with the goal of replacing animal slaughter with cellular meat. Fantastic, perhaps, but not scientifically impossible. The scientific challenge is euphoric.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. http://www.upc-online.org
You’d think these sods would have some humility and shame after Gain of Function research at the Wuhan Lab (denied as a ‘conspiracy theory’) causing the World to bloody shut down and the poor dying of hunger in these LockDowns; asides from giving us a new and often deadly Corona virus. But no……
Now we have the ‘brilliant’ pig to human heart transplant. All glee at the news on the radio. Wonder how that will pan out? One of the surgeons, she was SO casual in saying how many of these operations had been done on pigs to primates before getting to this daring try on pig to human.
One of the surgeons says “This is a very early experiment and will not translate into clinical practice within a short period of time,” he says. “If it works, it could be a small number of years away.”
A ’small number of years’…….I bet it will be a ‘large’ number of years assuming this actually ‘works’ and the side effects don’t kill the person.
Also a very interesting article put out by Science Media Centre on 11/1/2022 pointing out the chance of a virus mutating and escaping. https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-pig-heart-transplant/
Here is my take when writing to the Guardian in 2019 after yet another pig to human organ claim: ‘Pioneer UK surgeon Sir Terence English says adapted organs could transform treatment.’
‘Why do you buy into this every time? Just because a scientist says it? I presume scientists were at the forefront of discovering how to turn oil into plastic and 50 odd years down the line look where that has got us.
As to tweaking a bit of DNA here and there and hey presto we have pig hearts modified to transplant into humans…….oh please where do your sceptical faculties go to when talking to a professor.
We are constantly given the hope that pigs will be used as spare body parts.
The Ind 29/8/1992 ‘Pigs may become donors for human lung transplants….’within 10 yrs’
The Ind 24/6/1993 ‘Pig-to-human transplant …..“in 3 years”
The Ind 28/9/1993 ‘Animal organ transplants….. “likely within 3 yrs”
Daily Mail 28/9/1993 ‘Surgeons will successfully transplant animal organs into humans….. within 3 yrs’
Guardian 29/9/1993 ‘ Pigs may be key to transplants. Trials might start …within 3 yrs’
The Ind 30/3/94 ‘Pigs bred to carry human genes……use in transplant surgery within 3 yrs’.
Yet again we are told there is a cure for parkinson’s et al just around the corner. Hope over experience I would suggest.
Observer 24/7/1994 ‘Pigs’ liver transplant op…….. ‘later this year’
E. Standard 12/9/1995 ‘First human is to be given animal heart ….’next year’
Guardian 3/1/2002 The possibility of pig to human organ transplants took a leap forward on Christmas Day when a litter of genetically modified pigs was born in Virginia.
Guardian 10/9/2005 ‘Animal organ trials….. ‘within 5 yrs’
Times 3/6/2009 ‘GM pigs could provide organs for transplant …..’within a decade’
Daily Express 4/2/2010 ‘Scientists move a step closer to transplanting pig lungs into humans…within 5 yrs’
The Ind 21/10/2011 ‘Pig to human tissue transplants ‘imminent’
The Times 19/8/2019 Hopes of pig hearts for humans by 2022
Guardian19/8/2019 Pig to human heart transplants ‘possible within three years’
ANIMALS 24-7 is extremely skeptical that the global COVID-19 pandemic originated either from “gain of function” experiments in Wuhan or any other scientific procedure. It is clear, however, that it has continued to spread and worsen through disregard of science by anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.