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Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

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Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#151

Post by goku12 »

j_timberlake wrote: post #94

Transplanted kidneys get rejected by the recipient's immune system eventually, you'd really need to clone the kidney from the individual's DNA to solve the rejection problem. There's also been some success with integrating the DNA from the kidney donor (a human) into the recipient's bone marrow to stop the rejection process, but I hear it can be a brutal procedure in which the original bone marrow must be destroyed u…

> and really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning is a thing.

There was another technology under development, colloquially called the 'ghost heart' [1]. It uses a dead heart that's similar to a human's, most likely a pig's heart (I speculate that an unused human heart can also be used). They remove all the cells from the heart using a soap-like substance to obtain a ghostly white colored scaffolding of a heart (probably made of collagen). Then they use the recipient's own stem cells to grow heart muscles, blood vessels, etc on the scaffold. The process to get it to work like a human heart seems complicated, but doable. As you can guess, this heart is fully immunocompatible with the patient and doesn't require immunosuppressants like after a regular transplant. I imagine that this can eventually be replicated for any organ and that the improvement in the patient's quality of life it will bring is unthinkable in the current state of affairs. I'm not sure about the progress and current state of this technology, but several articles do turn up on searching.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/01/health/ghost-heart-life-i...

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#152

Post by amelius »

BrtByte wrote: post #141
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…

We're deep into the part of the sci-fi timeline where the tech works, and now the real challenge is cultural, ethical, and existential

We've invented social media, but democracy wasn't ready for it.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#153

Post by tombert »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #125

How about the donor piggy though? If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)

While I agree that it’s is pretty hard to ethically justify killing a pig for food, but I think I am ok with all that pig killing being used for helping sick humans.

While I don’t think we should be torturing animals or anything, obviously, I think I am humanist enough to where I think the ethical thing is to prioritize human lives or avoiding severe long-term discomfort (as is the case with dialysis).

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#154

Post by irjustin »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #118
irjustin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a system level - in Singapore it is. HDB (public) for affordable, private for everything else. 75+% of housing is part of the HDB system.

Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical Western political system to me. But then again gays were only very recently accepted there, right?

> Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead.

I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham.

But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current administration generally does a good job and is voted in with strong support.

So agreed, they can do really interesting things because of their time horizons of control combined with willingness to work for the better of the people.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#155

Post by JumpCrisscross »

goku12 wrote: post #144
matonski wrote: post #106

"This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person." Not quite the way I thought it should be phrased...

A bit of medical and historical context seems to invert its interpretation entirely. For example Louis Washkansky, the recipient of the first human transplant (performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa) lived for only 18 days before passing away from pneumonia. But nobody considers that historical fact as a negative when thinking about heart transplants these days. In comparison, this sta…

> It means that the xenotransplantation technology is progressing rapidly and will soon become widely available

It also validates the platform. If it can last for 6 months, chances are there isn’t some catastrophic failure mode that would keep it from lasting for 6 or 60 years.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#156

Post by winternewt »

russfink wrote: post #114
bawolff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In star trek they only figured that out in 2024, so we are only a year late. And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots" type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from it on the other hand does seem implausible) [For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became a utopia was first the government put poor people in internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in 2024,…

So we’re getting close in the US government is putting certain types of poor people in internment camps.

I think we already ticked that box

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#157

Post by fbxio »

magicalhippo wrote: post #99
pazimzadeh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most successful organs for transplantation, even in allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that they are working well in xeno as well. Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot. Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them wo…

A family member needed a kidney transplant in the early 60s. This was in the UK where the first successful transplant was in 1959, so just a few years earlier. Thanks to a kid on a motorcycle she got a kidney just in the nick of time. She was in her early 20s and was told she could expect a few years. Because of that she never had kids. Her donated kidney served her well and she lived a quite normal life. She passed…

Amazing story. Thanks for sharing. It shows how resilience and intuition matter.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#159

Post by iberator »

ofalkaed wrote: post #8
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…

I think Alan Kay deserves the credit for the tablet. We have vague allusions to tablet like things before Kay but it was Kay who really came up with concept.

What tablet are you talking about?!
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