Cardiac Xenotransplantation
Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast
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Transplantation of a Pig Heart Into a Baboon
Pigs may have less ethical issues because they are consumed in food widely. Before we started doing the genetic modifications, if you put a pig heart in a baboon, for example, which is a subtle bit for human in experimental transplantation, it rejects within minutes. We found out that there were several carbohydrate antigens in the pigs that for which human bodies have preexisting antibodies and then they attacked those carbohydrate antigen leading to graft rejection. So with that, we came to this tangent pig that we, the pig that we used in Mr. Bennett. And before that, during those testing, we showed that we can prolong the graft significantly that gave us confidence that,
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