Lawrence Faucette, the second living person to receive a genetically modified pig heart in a transplant, has died six weeks after the experimental procedure. The University of Maryland Medical Center, where the experimental procedure had been performed, said the heart began to show signs of rejection in recent days.
“Mr. Faucette’s last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience, so others may be guaranteed a chance for a new heart when a human organ is unavailable. He then told the team of doctors and nurses who gathered around him that he loved us. We will miss him tremendously,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, clinical director of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement. Griffith had performed the experimental surgery.
A lot of people think that regular human transplants are problem free but the vast majority of them are rejected by the receiver. If it’s for a life saving procedure it can only extend the life span by so much…
My dad had a double lung transplant several months ago…we were told by his transplant team that, with transplants, rejection is a “when”, not an “if”. However, if caught early enough, the docs can do an incredible amount to combat rejection.
Complete layperson here but it kind of astounds me that we haven’t cracked the code for this friend-or-foe identification. One would think there is some identifier or expression that is evaluated by the immune system and if we could match that we’d be golden but clearly not that simple.
We can’t even cure autoimmune diseases yet. Why the fuck has my immune system decided my own tissues are the enemy?! Such a dick move.
I started reading the book Immune by the team that runs the Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell) YouTube channel. The book is written for laypeople like us to understand, but I didn’t get very far before going “holy shit this is ridiculously complicated”. Honestly, just the fact that scientists understand any of this astounds me.
Our bodies are just winging it. It’s both beautiful and goodness and all kinds of other things but it’s a bit philosophical at times.
I had ITP. Autoimmune something which means they don’t know what caused it but my body stopped acknowledging that parts of my blood cell, not the entire one just a piece of it, we’re not me. Of course not me gets flushed out.
But the fancy words for part of a blood cell is called a platelet if you don’t have any platelets you don’t clot. As you can probably pick up not being able to clot is a big problem. I was in danger of bleeding out because my body decided to take out all my platelets.
Seems like an easy problem. If a whole blood cell is me because the DNA matches and all kinds of other things, obviously one cell of me is one cell of me. But if you take one cell of me and you break it up into pieces is it still one cell of me? By definition is not it is 50% of me…
So one cell of me is obviously me and one cell of you is obviously you but what happens when we get into percents at what percent does my cell stop becoming me?
Your body has the miraculous ability to identify ANYTHING that isn’t itself: viruses, fungi, bacteria, even lots of nearly-self things like cancer.
It’s likely not a solvable problem.
Honestly, this might sound weird, but if my body ever got to that point, I’d rather just go die in a war.
Better to go out with a bang than a wimper, imo.
I’m just curious if you have data behind this?
My understanding is that rejection related deaths in solid organ transplant recipients is only ~18% and that it is actually trending downward.
That’s not actually how it works. Rejection of a transplanted organ means the body is developing antibodies against the organ.
Successful dosing and continued use of immunosuppressants inhibit the body from “rejecting” the transplanted organ(s).
I suspect you’re operating off a commonly held idea that transplanted organs have a “shelf life” but that’s not really true.
It’s important to keep in mind that transplanting organs is still comparatively new medical science (only about 70 years old) and that transplants are often for older patients or patients with other underlying conditions that caused the original organ failure to begin with.
