A plan to clone and breed pigs for human heart transplants hopes to take flight over the next few years.
Dr. Eckhard Wolf, a scientist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, told the New York Post Thursday he is leading a team intending to carry out the experiment. The first generation of genetically altered pigs is expected to be born this year, with their hearts to be tested in baboon monkeys before a human clinical trial is conducted.
Wolf told the outlet of a recent transplant in which University of Maryland Medical Center surgeons transplanted a pig heart into a human patient on Jan. 7 as a last-ditch effort to save the patient’s life. His doctors say the patient is responding well, even though the risks of infection, organ rejection, and high blood pressure remain present, the outlet reported.
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The team’s plan will be based on a simpler version of a pig-to-human transplant, “namely with five genetic modifications,” Wolf told the outlet.
Wolf said the team would use “inefficient” cloning technology in their project, but only to generate “the founder animals.” Once these pigs are created, future genetically identical generations would be bred from them, according to the outlet.
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The modified pigs are expected to be ready by 2025 after the team tests their transplants on monkeys. They seek a human clinical trial two or three years from now, the outlet reported.
