Latest news with #xenotransplantation
CNN
11 hours ago
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The Organ Transplant Revolution Starts Here - Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta - Podcast on CNN Audio
Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:00:03 What you're about to hear is a story of history in the making. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:00:20 A medical first, a story of survival, bravery, and heroism. I'm not a hero. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:00:29 To try and solve a crisis. Taking the clamp off the artery. Nice and pink, yeah. You see, at any given moment, more than 100,000 people are waiting. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:00:56 And every day 17 people sadly will die. Speaker 2 00:01:00 For any organ that you name. Only 10% make it on the list. There's just not enough of. There's not enough. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:01:06 Now, the potential answer to this problem might sound crazy to many. Speaker 7 00:01:10 I have received a major, major, groundbreaking organ transplant. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:01:19 Controversial to some Speaker 7 00:01:21 for that animal. This is a life of deprivation. It's an early death. It is much suffering. I don't think that's ever okay. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:01:28 Even blasphemous to others. Speaker 5 00:01:30 Contacted the bishop and then the Vatican sent me a paper Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:01:34 But now, more than ever, it's also incredibly promising. Could animals be the answer? Is it right? Is it wrong? Can it even work? Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:01:49 That is an ultrasound with a pig kidney inside Tim, something that very few Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:01:54 people ever get to see. For the last two years, we've been searching for answers. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:02:01 It's powerful just to be here with these pigs. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:02:05 I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and here is part one of Animal Farm. In the remote mountains of Patagonia, about as far from civilization as you can get, Robert Montgomery almost died. Robert Montgomery 00:02:22 I had a cardiac arrest and my son was doing CPR on me and they put me in the back of a truck and drove me to a hospital and they looked at me and said we can't take care of this. They brought an ambulance up and continued resuscitation and drove five hours to the closest hospital. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:02:47 I've heard a lot of extraordinary stories throughout my career, but just the idea, the cardiac arrest, and then your son doing chest compressions on you. Robert Montgomery 00:02:54 Yeah, he saved my life. When I woke up I couldn't do anything, I couldn't walk or talk. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:03:09 That he even survived. It really is just so extraordinary. But still, the underlying problem, something known as dilated cardiomyopathy, where the heart is just too weak to adequately pump blood, that was still with him, lurking, constantly threatening his life. Robert Montgomery 00:03:28 Father died at 52 from cardiomyopathy, the same disease that I had. Brother dropped dead at 35. Another brother got a heart transplant at 39. And then me. I basically accepted that I might not live a normal lifespan. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:03:51 Almost every single man in his family, sick or dying of this heart disease. Was it your father's doctor who said that transplantation really wasn't going to be a solution? Robert Montgomery 00:04:04 My mother was really begging him to come up with something, and he said, you know, he's too old and... Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:04:12 52 Robert Montgomery 00:04:13 52 and it doesn't work anyway, so you wouldn't want that. That was 1976 Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:04:20 Even though the first successful heart transplant was back in 1967 in South Africa, it would take decades for it to become widely available. Not in time for Dr. Montgomery's dad. And so Robert Montgomery was given a mission, become a transplant surgeon, and hopefully one day save people just like his dad. Robert Montgomery 00:04:43 Alright, how does that look with the camera? Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:04:45 'It wasn't easy. By age 56, he had had three near-catastrophic cardiac arrests himself. The only cure, he was told, was a heart transplant. Robert Montgomery 00:04:56 For any organ that you name, only 10% make it on the list. I wasn't sick enough to get on the lists. You have to get so sick before you would even qualify to be in the running to receive an organ. And it's just unacceptable. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:05:12 And that's all because we have to ration organs. There's just not enough of them. Robert Montgomery 00:05:17 There's just not enough. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:05:18 But then it was the summer of 2018 when Robert Montgomery suddenly became sick enough. Once again, he was overseas. This time it was Italy, with his wife Denise. Denise Montgomery 00:05:30 Have four heart attacks that Robert Montgomery 00:05:32 I just had one cardiac arrest after another. They gave me last rights. Denise Montgomery 00:05:39 They revived him. He said I will die if I don't get out of here. Robert Montgomery 00:05:43 They left my IVs underneath my shirt and they gave my friend a bundle of preloaded resuscitation drugs and syringes and flew back because I knew that was my ticket. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:05:58 The odds of survival were still not in his favor. Robert Montgomery 00:06:02 Hi sweetheart Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:06:03 'You see, even after making it on the list, 17 people die every day while waiting. Remarkably, just three weeks later, a heart became available. But it came with a catch. His donor had died of a heroin overdose, and the heart was infected with hepatitis C. In the transplant world, that is typically a no-go. In fact, thousands of hep C-infected organs are discarded every year. But Dr. Montgomery insisted that his doctors still give it to him. Robert Montgomery 00:06:35 We had just done a study showing that you could take a hepatitis C positive organ and put it into a hepatitis C negative recipient and treat them with these new antivirals. You could successfully treat the virus. Denise Montgomery 00:06:47 Robert wasn't worried, and so I was. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:06:52 It was a risk, transplanting an infected organ into someone who had his immune system suppressed. But you're probably starting to see a pattern here. Montgomery was once again willing to take the chance and prove that these infected hearts could be used safely. Robert Montgomery 00:07:09 Hello to all my friends. And it worked. Thank you for your kind thoughts and your prayers, and I'm making a very nice recovery. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:07:18 Within weeks, he was able to walk out of the hospital. Today, he wants to show me the place he comes to treat patients, just like him. Robert Montgomery 00:07:27 I was in this room right around the corner, so I have good feelings about this place actually. It's like hope. Yeah, it's hope. It represents hope. Behind that door, yeah. Denise Montgomery 00:07:37 He is a man on a mission. He wants to see this eradicated. Robert Montgomery 00:07:43 If this were like a cancer drug, we wouldn't allow something to be rationed like this, right? We just don't have any choice right now. So we need another choice. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:07:52 Another choice which Montgomery is now racing to find. Tim Andrews 00:07:57 I'll help you down. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:07:58 Another choice, hopefully, for this man. Tim Andrews has been living with diabetes since the 1990s, successfully managing it with insulin. Retired and happily married to his second wife, Karen, these empty nesters had big plans for their new life together, traveling the world, until one day in 2022. Tim Andrews 00:08:19 I got tired, I was like, oh my god, I'm gonna fall asleep or something. So I was checked and they said, oh yeah, stage three, kidney failure. Oh, okay. And a month later they're telling me, I am at end stage. Wow, just one month. Just one month, just quit on it. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:08:38 And what were you feeling like at that point? Tim Andrews 00:08:40 I mean, I was told, literally told, you have dialysis or you pick a box. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:08:50 It was a false choice, certain death or dialysis, meaning being dependent on a machine for the rest of his life. Tim Andrews 00:08:59 The first couple of months was like, hey, this is not gonna be so bad. As time went on, like six months in, I had a heart attack. It takes a toll on you emotionally and physically. Tim Andrews 00:09:29 This is where I get to sit. Without it, six weeks, eight weeks later, I'd be dead. It's a necessary evil. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:09:37 Necessary at least until he could get a kidney transplant. But again, just as with Montgomery, he knew that could take a while, might never happen, and the clock was ticking. I was ready to die in this chair. And that is when he learned about another option, brand new, still relatively untested. Speaker 11 00:09:58 Some people said, there's not enough information. Don't do this yet. Don't this yet." Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:10:09 You can't really tell by looking at them, but these tiny piglets have been genetically engineered to make their organs more acceptable for transplantation into humans. It's something known as xenotransplantation. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:10:22 So Mike, how unusual is it for us to even be here? Mike Curtis 00:10:25 This is very unusual. We usually try to limit this to only the staff that takes care of the animals. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:10:31 Mike Curtis is the CEO of biotech company eGenesis. Never before has he let cameras onto this very special pig farm. Mike Curtis 00:10:40 Everything's controlled, like all of the feed is clean, water's clean, the staff is clean. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:10:45 And I should just point out that I walked into a room, turned on a filter, essentially cleaned the air for five minutes before I could then go shower. That's why my hair is wet. I put on everything new here, including underwear, socks, shoes. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:10:59 The goal is to protect the pigs from us. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:11:14 You know, I got to tell you, I did not know what to expect, but it's powerful just to be here with these pigs. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:11:23 After all, these pigs are among the most genetically modified mammals on the planet. Mike Curtis 00:11:29 These piglets carry a total of 69 edits to the genome. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:11:34 Alterations to their DNA. Mike Curtis 00:11:37 We're trying to reduce the risk of disease transmission from the porcine donor to human, we're editing in a way that reduces or eliminates hypercute rejection, and then we add human regulatory trans genes to control rejection. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:11:50 'To do that, scientists take the unedited pig cells and use a gene editing tool called CRISPR. They add special CRISPR fluids to the cells, which splices out certain genes and adds other genes. You can't really see anything with the naked eye and it takes only seconds, but what is happening in this vial is truly remarkable. Let me take a second and explain. First of all, remember that all DNA is made up of four chemical bases, A, C, G and T. Think of that as your genetic blueprint. Now, a pig's DNA and a human's DNA, they actually look pretty similar, but there are some important differences. For example, the GGTA1 gene that is responsible for a carbohydrate that forms around a pig cell known as alpha-gal. Now if you put that into a human, it would cause almost instantaneous rejection. But by knocking out that specific sequence and then adding in others. Scientists can make the pig's organs much more compatible for humans. Mike Curtis 00:12:55 So in the freezer are all these cells that we've edited. We thaw that vial, we grow those cells, and then we take the nucleus from that edited cell and we transfer it. It's akin to what was done with Dolly back in the 90s, cloning. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:13:09 'And that is the process by which they have created a modern-day assembly line of genetically modified pigs. Mike Curtis 00:13:17 We've selected the Yucatan Mini Pig because fully grown, they're about 70 kilos, 150 pounds. Right, so the organs are correctly sized for a human recipient. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:13:27 Ultimately, you've got to get the size right. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:13:31 Now, if the idea of using animals for human transplants sounds familiar to you, it's because the concept has been around for a long time. There have been at least 48 cases reported in the medical literature since the 1900s. You may remember one of the most famous. Robert Montgomery 00:13:46 This is Baby Faye. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:13:47 Little baby Faye in 1984. She had a baboon heart that kept her alive for 20 days. But there was always the stubborn issue of rejection. And so for a long time, xenotransplants faded into the background. Robert Montgomery 00:14:01 I think we've turned up the throttle significantly. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:14:05 What's led to that? Robert Montgomery 00:14:06 What we did is transplanted one of these organs into someone who had wanted to donate their organs was brain dead. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:14:14 'You heard that right. The first human patients to receive the gene-edited pig kidneys were brain dead. Why? In order to move the field forward without moving too fast. First, the scientists just wanted to prove that pig organs could survive in a human body. Dr. Robert Montgomery performed that operation on Maurice Miller, who was brain dead Robert Montgomery 00:14:39 We took the clamps off to let the blood go into the organ and it turned this beautiful pink color and started to make urine immediately. Robert Montgomery 00:14:48 Pretty looking kidney. Robert Montgomery 00:14:49 'That was mind-blowing. So it looks a lot like a human kidney. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:14:54 In fact, when I first met Dr. Montgomery a few years ago, he was reviewing Maurice Miller's kidney biopsy. Here's what they learned. About a month into the transplant, the pig kidney did begin to show signs of rejection. Robert Montgomery 00:15:08 See that red? Yes. That's hemorrhage. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:15:11 'But importantly, standard anti-rejection drugs did work. And the kidney function is okay? Robert Montgomery 00:15:18 It's back to normal. Robert Montgomery 00:15:20 It gave, I think, the FDA some confidence that this was going to work in humans. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:15:27 'With all that research in the background, in 2022, the University of Maryland School of Medicine announced the first xenotransplant into a living recipient, someone who is not brain dead. It would be a pig heart into 57-year-old David Bennett. Give me a high five, buddy. That was awesome. David Ayers 00:15:46 We saw two months survival of that patient and now incrementally seeing longer and longer survival in these compassionate use patients. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:15:55 David Ayers is a giant of a man. Seeing him on this farm in Blacksburg, Virginia, you may not know that he is also considered one of the most widely regarded geneticists in the world. David Ayers 00:16:06 We have about 300 research animals here. We grow the designated pathogen free pigs that were ultimately used for the decedent studies, as well as the patients that have received our organs for transplant, both hearts and kidneys. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:16:23 He's taking me to meet some of the farm's newest arrivals. David Ayers 00:16:28 Watch your head, maybe that's just me. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:16:34 There's a lot of piglets David Ayers 00:16:37 Do you want to hold one? Yeah, sure. So these are ten gene Clone Piglets. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:16:44 Here at United Therapeutics, they perform 10 gene edits on their pigs. Now remember, eGenesis in Wisconsin perform more than 60. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:16:57 If you're doing 6 times as many edits does that make it much better? David Ayers 00:16:58 I don't think more edits is necessarily better or worse. The additional 50 edits that eGenesis has done are to inactivate an endogenous pig virus. We've actually addressed that by breeding. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:17:12 In 2024, the first pig kidney transplant was announced. Speaker 14 00:17:16 My name is Dr. Leo Riella. I'm medical director of the kidney transplant program Mass General. Today, we announce the successful gene added to pay kidney transplant into a living human. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:17:28 Tim Andrews, still on dialysis, was watching all of this unfold. Tim Andrews 00:17:34 I'm like, oh, they're doing it at Mass General. And I was like, I have to be part of this. I'm not gonna make it, but I'll make it to this. And I'll tell you right up front, if it's one day and you learn something, thank God. Dr. Riella 00:17:50 His eyes really sparked up and he said, tell me what I need to do. Speaker 11 00:17:56 And they said, prepare your body for battle, because it's gonna be a battle. He had to do dental work, he had to go to physical therapy. We signed up for the gym. When he came back to see Dr. Riella, he had lost 22 pounds. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:13 Did you have any doubts along the way? Tim Andrews 00:18:16 You know, there's always doubt with it, but I'm like, this is my chance to do something. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:23 You're going to be in medical history books forever. Tim Andrews 00:18:27 Kids are going to be taught how to do it, watching me have one put in me. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:33 They'll know your name. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:38 It's a crisp January morning back at the Egenesis Pig Farm in Wisconsin. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:44 It's been more than a year since our first visit. Speaker 3 00:18:47 This is many years in the making. So Raphael, she'll be able to donate one of her kidneys to a man who's in dire need. And essentially, she's saving his life. Speaker 15 00:18:59 Go, Raphael! It's a really big moment. There's a lot of emotions. We love our piglets like our own. Thinking about the purpose that Raphael is serving, like getting to go and give someone a new lease on life is just such a gift. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:19:18 That someone is Tim Andrews. Raphael will be his donor. Tim Andrews 00:19:25 What a gift. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:19:30 'As Rafael departs for the 17-hour trip to Boston, Tim settles in at Mass General. Tim Andrews 00:19:37 I knew I was in great hands, these guys are just so good. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:19:42 Were you nervous the morning of? Dr. Riella 00:19:45 And we'll see you on the other side, getting ready. As a new man. We're all anxious and nervous about going through a procedure that has not been done before. And having that reassurance from him also brings a lot of positivity to the entire team. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:20:02 It's early morning, January 25th, when Dr. Riella and the surgical team travel about 50 miles outside of Boston to meet Rafael. Dr. Riella 00:20:11 It was an OR, very similar to what we see in the hospital, and the surgery to retrieve the organs occur there. They look very similar to how we do procurements. I think uniqueness is really that, who was a donor, who was coming, yeah, it was a pig. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:20:29 It's go time! Speaker 11 00:20:30 It's a dance to get the pig kidney there and get him in the operating room. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:20:37 They gotta coordinate it. Speaker 11 00:20:37 So a nurse came and said, okay, good to go. I'm like, wait, wait. We haven't said goodbye. You can't say goodbye. Oh, yes, I can. So, I actually made them wait and they said, we've got to go, I'm saying goodbye to my husband before he leaves for surgery and he may not come back. Speaker 17 00:21:00 It's a little chilly in here, okay, Tim? Tim Andrews 00:21:01 I like cold. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:21:02 The operation lasts a little over two hours, around the same as a traditional transplant, and the big kidney. It looks, feels, and functions very much like a human kidney. And here is when surgeons connect the pig kidney to Tim's artery and vein. After that, the moment of truth. Surgeons release the clamp so blood can flow into the kidneys and the organ turns pink. And now this, urine, successfully flowing through the kidneys. Dr. Riella 00:21:36 Wow, look at that. We were very surprised. We were hoping that we would start making urine within a day or two, but seeing the urine being produced right away was not what at least I expected to be happening that close. Everything went well. Speaker 11 00:21:53 They said, they put the kidney on the table and started connecting him to the kidney and he actually peed across the room. So they were very, very excited. Of course, I started bawling like a baby. We were all crying. I mean, we were all. oh my goodness, I mean, this is not the end, but we're getting there, we're getting there. Tim Andrews 00:22:19 'I felt great and all of a sudden I had energy and I was like, this is beyond what I thought I was going to get. So right away you felt that coming? Right away I felt that. I was, like, look at me, I'm a new man, it was like a new birth, I said, I have a new birthday, 125-25 is my new birthday. Because I was alive and I hadn't been for a long time and I'm like, this is amazing. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:22:57 But there was still a long way to go. This is still so experimental after all. And Tim and Karen knew how quickly things could change. It was just a year earlier that Lisa Passano also needed a kidney. Her daughter, Brittany Rydell, remembers just how sick her mother was. Brittany Rydell 00:23:17 It means no more dialysis, hopefully. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:23:20 'Like Tim, she was an end-stage kidney disease, but Lisa's heart was also failing. And that is why a traditional kidney transplant was not an option for her. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:23:30 She was too sick. Brittany Rydell 00:23:32 Yeah, absolutely. Robert Montgomery 00:23:34 Lisa Passano was on death's door. I mean, she was not gonna live. You know, days to weeks from dying. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:23:44 So Dr. Montgomery, who was her surgeon, suggested a pig kidney. Robert Montgomery 00:23:48 But there are some people who are willing to take that chance, and she was one of them. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:23:54 'In the spring of 2024, Lisa Pisano became one of the first two patients in the world to receive a gene-edited pig kidney transplant. Brittany Rydell 00:24:02 I got more energy. I feel energized. After her kidney transplant, I have to say she looked the best that she looked in so I've seen her so happy. It was definitely the healthiest I had seen her in a while. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:24:15 She was doing well at that point. Brittany Rydell 00:24:17 Yeah, we were so hopeful, because I had seen her so much better, and I figured if anything was going to go wrong, it would have went wrong at that moment, and not months later. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:24:28 Pesano developed several infections and never recovered enough to leave the hospital. Brittany Rydell 00:24:33 I don't have regrets about the surgery, I just wish that she could have had the opportunity to really enjoy it more. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:24:40 I know it's probably hard to sort of think of it this way, but she was a real pioneer. Brittany Rydell 00:24:45 One of the first things she said to me was even if this doesn't work for me, it can work for someone else. And I think about that a lot. Robert Montgomery 00:24:52 The first patient that we did was in this bed, in the bed that I was in, Lisa Passano. You know, taking care of that one life. And if they were just that, that would be great, but then you have this opportunity to really impact maybe thousands, maybe millions of lives. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:25:11 Now Tim knew Lisa's story. He knew that there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Tim Andrews 00:25:17 Stepping forward, you're gonna do something for humanity. This is a way that we can bring this forward. And this is the hope for all these people that it's gonna be okay. We're gonna find a way, which is amazing to me. It was just, I have to be part of this. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:25:40 So would this be a success for Tim, and what does it all mean for the 100,000 people currently waiting? Tim Andrews 00:25:47 There's bumps in the road. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:25:48 We'll dive into that when we come back next week with part two of Animal Farm. Thanks for listening.
CNN
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Tornado spotted in Colorado
Tornado spotted in Colorado Video captured a tornado in Aurora, Colorado after severe weather swept through parts of the state. 00:20 - Source: CNN Vertical Trending Now 13 videos Tornado spotted in Colorado Video captured a tornado in Aurora, Colorado after severe weather swept through parts of the state. 00:20 - Source: CNN Pigs may be solution to organ shortage CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores how pigs could help address the human organ shortage through xenotransplantation. Learn how both a pig's similarities and differences make their organs a good match for humans. 'Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: Animal Pharm' airs Sunday at 8pm ET/PT on CNN. 01:27 - Source: CNN Rare dust storm blankets Chicago The Chicago skyline disappeared momentarily as a wall of dust blew through the city. The National Weather Service attributed this to 60 to 70 mph winds that blew over dry farmlands, collecting dust and blowing it through the Chicago area, according to CNN affiliate WBBM. 00:32 - Source: CNN 'Robocake' includes edible batteries made of dark chocolate This wedding cake, created by researchers and chefs in partnership with the RoboFood project, has edible robotic bears that dance and chocolate batteries that power the candles. 01:28 - Source: CNN Pete Rose eligible for Hall of Fame Major League Baseball removed Pete Rose and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson - two of the sport's most famous players who were previously kicked out of baseball for gambling on the game - from the league's ineligible list. The historic decision allows Rose to be considered for induction into the iconic Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor that was previously ruled out as part of the settlement he reached with the league back in 1989. CNN's Andy Scholes explains. 01:03 - Source: CNN Kim Kardashian tells Paris robber she forgives him CNN's Max Foster notes three words that stood out during Kim Kardashian's five hours of testimony in a Paris courtroom today, where ten defendants are facing charges including armed robbery, kidnapping, and conspiracy. 01:07 - Source: CNN CNN tries what Peruvian locals say is Pope Leo's favorite dish CNN's Stefano Pozzebon is in Chiclayo, Peru, to try what locals say is Pope Leo XIV's favorite dish: cabrito chiclayano. The pope would come to this restaurant in the Peruvian city for lunch as recently as two years ago. 00:43 - Source: CNN Erin Burnett goes inside the papal bowling alley CNN's Erin Burnett goes inside the Pontifical North American College in Rome and the pope's bowling alley 00:32 - Source: CNN 'Twist, drop and push': Rowing like a Venetian In 'Saving Venice,' CNN's Erica Hill speaks with a collective of locals interested in promoting a more ethical tourism industry with respect for Venice's unique and delicate environment. She learns about the innovative ways a new generation of Venetians are working to preserve the city's traditions, mitigate the effects of climate change, and taper the city's dependence on massive amounts of tourists. 'Saving Venice' for 'The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper' premieres Sunday at 8p ET/PT on CNN. 01:12 - Source: CNN Rare volcanic eruption not seen in nearly 40 years Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano could be seen hurling lava upwards of 300 feet into the air during a series of 'rapid rebounds,' which scientists say hasn't been seen in nearly 40 years. 00:33 - Source: CNN Man injects himself over 600 times with snake venom Tim Friede, a self-taught snake expert from California, injected himself with snake venom 654 times over 18 years and later contributed his blood to help scientists develop a new universal antivenom. 01:42 - Source: CNN Hundreds of dachshunds gather in Hungary in record breaking attempt In Hungary, dachshunds and their owners gathered in an attempt to break the record of biggest ever dog walk – a record previously set at 897 by the German city of Regensburg. The Hungarian Records of Association tallied the dogs as they walked through the street with their owners. 00:41 - Source: CNN Bored at the airport? For these travelers, it's showtime! Dancer and choreographer Blake McGrath felt the urge to whip out a dance combo while waiting for his flight at Dallas-Fort Worth International. The flight left without him, but when he uploaded the video to TikTok, it quickly went viral and eventually grabbed over 6.7 million views. 01:41 - Source: CNN
CNN
18-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Pigs may be the solution to the human organ shortage
CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores how pigs could help address the human organ shortage through xenotransplantation. Learn how both a pig's similarities and differences make their organs a good match for humans. 'Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: Animal Pharm' airs Sunday at 8pm ET/PT on CNN.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The gift of life: A visual history of organ transplantation
EDITOR'S NOTE: Watch 'Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: Animal Pharm' on Sunday, May 18, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CNN. There were more than 48,000 organ transplants in the United States last year. They're commonplace now, but the practice was considered experimental only a half-century ago. Until just the past few years, transplants almost always involved human organs. Now, early experiments in xenotransplantation — transplanting animal organs into humans — are creating potential pathways to save lives. Here's a look back at how we got to this point. Xenotransplantation, the practice of transplanting organs between species, is a concept that has been around for hundreds of years. Early in the 20th century, Dr. Mathieu Jaboulay turned the idea into action with one of the first well-documented attempts to make an animal organ work for a human. In 1906 in Lyon, France, Jaboulay attached a pig kidney to a 48-year-old woman's elbow, choosing that spot because it was easy to access. Blood circulated through the kidney, and the kidney produced urine, something even some human donations in this period failed to do, studies show. The pig kidney quickly failed, and the patient died soon after due to an infection. 'The lack of having ready access to human organs has always sort of been the holy grail, that you would have something in reserve that didn't require a human to die in order for another human to live,' said Dr. Jeffrey Stern, a senior member of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute's xenotransplantation team. 'Obviously, animals as that source is sort of an ideal version of that.' In 1954, the world's first successful human organ transplant was performed by Dr. Joseph E. Murray at what's now called Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Murray took a kidney from 22-year-old Ronald Herrick and transplanted it into Richard Herrick, his twin brother. Because they were identical, Richard's immune system thought the new organ was its own, which prevented it from rejecting the foreign organ. Richard Herrick lived another eight years, and his organ donor brother had no harmful side effects. 'I think that really moved the field,' said Dr. Stefan Tullius, chief of the Division of Transplant Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. 'What that did show is that if you have the right combination and relationship between donor and recipient, then you indeed can transplant an organ and that is going to work,' Tullius added. Since immunosuppressive drugs were not yet available, transplant experiments seemed to work only with twins whose immune systems thought the foreign organ were their own. 'You still ran into all those issues for the next 30 years with the immune system,' said Stern, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. 'Not everyone has an identical twin.' In the 1960s, Murray demonstrated in several experiments with dogs that an organ transplant would be more successful if the recipient received drugs to suppress the immune system after the procedure, to lower the chances of rejection. In April 1962, in a world first that built on what he learned from those experiments, Murphy transplanted a kidney from a deceased donor into an unrelated human who was treated with an immunosuppressant called azathioprine. The patient survived more than a year, and s survival time lengthened even further when doctors discovered that an immunosuppressant worked better if given along with the steroid prednisone. In June 1963, one of Murray's research fellows, Belgian surgeon Dr. Guy Alexandre, performed the first transplant operation from a brain-dead donor, a controversial procedure at the time. Alexandre had been searching for a kidney for a patient with renal failure when a woman who had been in a car accident was brought in to his Hôpital Saint-Pierre in Brussels. Her heart was beating, but she showed no brain activity. Knowing that organs lost viability as soon as a patient's heart stopped, Alexandre got permission from his department chair to transplant the woman's kidney into his patient with renal failure. The recipient lived another 87 days. Over the next couple of years, Alexandre secretly performed other kidney transplants using brain-dead donors to see if such an approach would lengthen survival time compared with transplants from donors whose hearts had stopped. He disclosed the experiments at a medical conference a couple years later, to mixed reactions. It wasn't until 1968 that a Harvard Medical School committee published its recommendation that irreversible loss of brain function – once called 'irreversible coma' – would be a new criterion for death. Afterward, transplants involving brain-dead donors became more common, vastly expanding the pool of available organs. 'To come up with the definition of brain death as an alternative to cardiac death – so the discontinuation of circulation – was huge, because it allowed the procurement of organs,' Tullius said. Transplant doctors started experimenting with kidneys because humans have two and can survive with only one. Patients also had the option of dialysis if the transplant failed. But the more the doctors learned, the more confident they became that they could transplant other organs. By the late 1960s, they started to experiment with livers and pancreases, and in 1967, South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard of Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town performed the first heart transplant. He transplanted a 25-year-old's heart into a 53-year-old grocer who was dying from chronic heart disease. The grocer died 18 days later from a lung infection, but the heart continued to beat until his death. Barnard's second heart transplant patient lived almost 19 months. His fifth and sixth patients lived for almost 13 and 24 years, respectively. By the 1990s, immunosuppressants like cyclosporine and tacrolimus opened new possibilities for transplants of multiple tissues. In 1998, Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard did the first surgical hand transplant in Lyon, France. In 2005, he and Dr. Bernard Devauchelle performed the first partial face transplant for Isabelle Dinoire, a woman who lost part of her face in a dog attack. In 2010, a Spanish team led by Dr. Juan Barret performed the first full-face transplant. 'There's the first 30 years of transplantation that everything was sort of experimental, right?' Stern said. 'It wasn't a commonplace endeavor that we do what we currently do, and it was a lot of trial and error and survival, and sort of the entire field of transplantation, I think, was very tenuous in that. It was adaptation and invention of new technologies that allowed transplantation to become commonplace.' In 1984, Dr. Leonard Bailey tried to save the life of Stephanie Fae Beauclair at Loma Linda University in California. The child, who became known as Baby Fae, was born with a deadly heart condition, and Bailey, who had been experimenting with cross-species transplants in animals, got permission to transplant a baboon heart. Stephanie lived just 21 more days, but the case generated more awareness about the need for infant organ donations and the possibility of cross-species transplantation. Eventually, scientists decided that primates, although evolutionarily the closest cousin to humans, weren't the best organ donors. 'Primates turned out to be too small, too expensive and too controversial,' said medical ethicist Dr. Art Caplan, who works with transplant cases at NYU. There was also a concern about infection. Non-human primates may carry a variety of pathogens that are not harmful to them but that can cause disease in humans, including Marburg virus and HIV. Eventually, scientists realized that pigs would be a better option: They're anatomically similar to humans, they breed quickly, and there was a reduced risk of zoonotic disease. Research in xenotransplantation stalled until the development of the gene editing tool CRISPR in the early 2000s. This Nobel-winning technology gave scientists the ability to edit the pig genome to make it more compatible with humans', including knocking out key sequences in pig DNA that would result in almost automatic organ rejection in people. Combining that with cloning techniques gave scientists a chance to maintain consistent genetics and produce universal pig donors. 'Cloning and to apply CRISPR, to have the opportunity of gene editing, is really allowing not only transplantation but is also relevant for other areas of medicine,' Tullius said. 'I would put those in the revolutionary category.' Pig organs had been transplanted into non-human primates, but the real test came in September 2021, when a genetically engineered pig kidney was transplanted to a brain-dead patient at NYU Langone. The kidney was attached to the blood vessels in the recipient's upper leg, outside the abdomen, for 54 hours while doctors studied how well it functioned. The organ seemed to function as well as a human kidney transplant, and the doctors did not see any signs of rejection. 'We learned more from that than anything else that we've done,' Dr. Robert Montgomery, one of the surgeons who performed the procedure, told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. 'It was really the basis of how we were able to figure out how to treat rejection in our living patients.' 'The family graciously approved donation of their loved one's body for this procedure. That extraordinary generosity paved the way for this major step forward in creating a sustainable supply of life-saving organs and hopefully ending the current paradigm that someone has to die for someone to live,' Montgomery said in a news release at the time. On January 7, 2022, surgeons at the University of Maryland School of Medicine performed the first xenotransplant into a living person. David Bennett, 57, could not walk and relied on an artificial lung and heart bypass machine to stay alive. He was too sick to qualify for a human heart but was able to undergo the experimental procedure under the US Food and Drug Administration's compassionate use pathway, which allows patients with no other alternatives to try experimental treatments. He lived two additional months, having the chance to spend more time with his family and watch the Super Bowl. 'As with any first-in-the-world transplant surgery, this one led to valuable insights that will hopefully inform transplant surgeons to improve outcomes and potentially provide lifesaving benefits to future patients,' said his surgeon, Dr. Bartley Griffith. Bennett was the first of a handful of compassionate use xenotransplant patients. But as researchers approach clinical trials, they hope they will have a better understanding of how successful the organs can be under more typical circumstances. 'The promise of xenotransplantation is the promise of hope for our patients. A hope for the future that for too long has been uncertain. It is hope turned to possibility turned to reality. Our patients can dream again about graduations, weddings … about life. Hope should not have to be rationed,' said Dr. Jayme Locke, a professor of surgery at NYU Langone. 'Multiple shots on goal' is how geneticist Dr. David Ayares describes United Therapeutics' approach to the future of organ transplantation. This summer, the company will embark on the first FDA clinical trial of xenotransplantation. 'So instead of one-off compassionate use transplants that were very valuable in learning how to optimize and extend the survival of these patients, now we can go into a multicenter trial,' Ayares, president and chief scientific officer of Revivicor, a United Therapeutics subsidiary, told Gupta. But that still won't be enough to solve the organ shortage completely, so United Therapeutics and others in the transplant community are continuing to think farther into the future. 'I think the next thing we're going to do is … create personalized organs where we don't have to use any immunosuppression,' Montgomery said of what he expects down the road. This could mean using a pig's organ as scaffolding where scientists could seed human stem cells, or even 3D-printing organs. 'Then you have a designer organ for that person when they need it,' Montgomery said.
CNN
17-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
The gift of life: A visual history of organ transplantation
Animal stories Genetics New in medicineFacebookTweetLink Follow EDITOR'S NOTE: Watch 'Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: Animal Pharm' on Sunday, May 18, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CNN. There were more than 48,000 organ transplants in the United States last year. They're commonplace now, but the practice was considered experimental only a half-century ago. Until just the past few years, transplants almost always involved human organs. Now, early experiments in xenotransplantation — transplanting animal organs into humans — are creating potential pathways to save lives. Here's a look back at how we got to this point. Xenotransplantation, the practice of transplanting organs between species, is a concept that has been around for hundreds of years. Early in the 20th century, Dr. Mathieu Jaboulay turned the idea into action with one of the first well-documented attempts to make an animal organ work for a human. In 1906 in Lyon, France, Jaboulay attached a pig kidney to a 48-year-old woman's elbow, choosing that spot because it was easy to access. Blood circulated through the kidney, and the kidney produced urine, something even some human donations in this period failed to do, studies show. The pig kidney quickly failed, and the patient died soon after due to an infection. 'The lack of having ready access to human organs has always sort of been the holy grail, that you would have something in reserve that didn't require a human to die in order for another human to live,' said Dr. Jeffrey Stern, a senior member of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute's xenotransplantation team. 'Obviously, animals as that source is sort of an ideal version of that.' In 1954, the world's first successful human organ transplant was performed by Dr. Joseph E. Murray at what's now called Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Murray took a kidney from 22-year-old Ronald Herrick and transplanted it into Richard Herrick, his twin brother. Because they were identical, Richard's immune system thought the new organ was its own, which prevented it from rejecting the foreign organ. Richard Herrick lived another eight years, and his organ donor brother had no harmful side effects. 'I think that really moved the field,' said Dr. Stefan Tullius, chief of the Division of Transplant Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. 'What that did show is that if you have the right combination and relationship between donor and recipient, then you indeed can transplant an organ and that is going to work,' Tullius added. Since immunosuppressive drugs were not yet available, transplant experiments seemed to work only with twins whose immune systems thought the foreign organ were their own. 'You still ran into all those issues for the next 30 years with the immune system,' said Stern, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. 'Not everyone has an identical twin.' In the 1960s, Murray demonstrated in several experiments with dogs that an organ transplant would be more successful if the recipient received drugs to suppress the immune system after the procedure, to lower the chances of rejection. In April 1962, in a world first that built on what he learned from those experiments, Murphy transplanted a kidney from a deceased donor into an unrelated human who was treated with an immunosuppressant called azathioprine. The patient survived more than a year, and s survival time lengthened even further when doctors discovered that an immunosuppressant worked better if given along with the steroid prednisone. In June 1963, one of Murray's research fellows, Belgian surgeon Dr. Guy Alexandre, performed the first transplant operation from a brain-dead donor, a controversial procedure at the time. Alexandre had been searching for a kidney for a patient with renal failure when a woman who had been in a car accident was brought in to his Hôpital Saint-Pierre in Brussels. Her heart was beating, but she showed no brain activity. Knowing that organs lost viability as soon as a patient's heart stopped, Alexandre got permission from his department chair to transplant the woman's kidney into his patient with renal failure. The recipient lived another 87 days. Over the next couple of years, Alexandre secretly performed other kidney transplants using brain-dead donors to see if such an approach would lengthen survival time compared with transplants from donors whose hearts had stopped. He disclosed the experiments at a medical conference a couple years later, to mixed reactions. It wasn't until 1968 that a Harvard Medical School committee published its recommendation that irreversible loss of brain function – once called 'irreversible coma' – would be a new criterion for death. Afterward, transplants involving brain-dead donors became more common, vastly expanding the pool of available organs. 'To come up with the definition of brain death as an alternative to cardiac death – so the discontinuation of circulation – was huge, because it allowed the procurement of organs,' Tullius said. Transplant doctors started experimenting with kidneys because humans have two and can survive with only one. Patients also had the option of dialysis if the transplant failed. But the more the doctors learned, the more confident they became that they could transplant other organs. By the late 1960s, they started to experiment with livers and pancreases, and in 1967, South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard of Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town performed the first heart transplant. He transplanted a 25-year-old's heart into a 53-year-old grocer who was dying from chronic heart disease. The grocer died 18 days later from a lung infection, but the heart continued to beat until his death. Barnard's second heart transplant patient lived almost 19 months. His fifth and sixth patients lived for almost 13 and 24 years, respectively. By the 1990s, immunosuppressants like cyclosporine and tacrolimus opened new possibilities for transplants of multiple tissues. In 1998, Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard did the first surgical hand transplant in Lyon, France. In 2005, he and Dr. Bernard Devauchelle performed the first partial face transplant for Isabelle Dinoire, a woman who lost part of her face in a dog attack. In 2010, a Spanish team led by Dr. Juan Barret performed the first full-face transplant. 'There's the first 30 years of transplantation that everything was sort of experimental, right?' Stern said. 'It wasn't a commonplace endeavor that we do what we currently do, and it was a lot of trial and error and survival, and sort of the entire field of transplantation, I think, was very tenuous in that. It was adaptation and invention of new technologies that allowed transplantation to become commonplace.' In 1984, Dr. Leonard Bailey tried to save the life of Stephanie Fae Beauclair at Loma Linda University in California. The child, who became known as Baby Fae, was born with a deadly heart condition, and Bailey, who had been experimenting with cross-species transplants in animals, got permission to transplant a baboon heart. Stephanie lived just 21 more days, but the case generated more awareness about the need for infant organ donations and the possibility of cross-species transplantation. Eventually, scientists decided that primates, although evolutionarily the closest cousin to humans, weren't the best organ donors. 'Primates turned out to be too small, too expensive and too controversial,' said medical ethicist Dr. Art Caplan, who works with transplant cases at NYU. There was also a concern about infection. Non-human primates may carry a variety of pathogens that are not harmful to them but that can cause disease in humans, including Marburg virus and HIV. Eventually, scientists realized that pigs would be a better option: They're anatomically similar to humans, they breed quickly, and there was a reduced risk of zoonotic disease. Research in xenotransplantation stalled until the development of the gene editing tool CRISPR in the early 2000s. This Nobel-winning technology gave scientists the ability to edit the pig genome to make it more compatible with humans', including knocking out key sequences in pig DNA that would result in almost automatic organ rejection in people. Combining that with cloning techniques gave scientists a chance to maintain consistent genetics and produce universal pig donors. 'Cloning and to apply CRISPR, to have the opportunity of gene editing, is really allowing not only transplantation but is also relevant for other areas of medicine,' Tullius said. 'I would put those in the revolutionary category.' Pig organs had been transplanted into non-human primates, but the real test came in September 2021, when a genetically engineered pig kidney was transplanted to a brain-dead patient at NYU Langone. The kidney was attached to the blood vessels in the recipient's upper leg, outside the abdomen, for 54 hours while doctors studied how well it functioned. The organ seemed to function as well as a human kidney transplant, and the doctors did not see any signs of rejection. 'We learned more from that than anything else that we've done,' Dr. Robert Montgomery, one of the surgeons who performed the procedure, told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. 'It was really the basis of how we were able to figure out how to treat rejection in our living patients.' 'The family graciously approved donation of their loved one's body for this procedure. That extraordinary generosity paved the way for this major step forward in creating a sustainable supply of life-saving organs and hopefully ending the current paradigm that someone has to die for someone to live,' Montgomery said in a news release at the time. On January 7, 2022, surgeons at the University of Maryland School of Medicine performed the first xenotransplant into a living person. David Bennett, 57, could not walk and relied on an artificial lung and heart bypass machine to stay alive. He was too sick to qualify for a human heart but was able to undergo the experimental procedure under the US Food and Drug Administration's compassionate use pathway, which allows patients with no other alternatives to try experimental treatments. He lived two additional months, having the chance to spend more time with his family and watch the Super Bowl. 'As with any first-in-the-world transplant surgery, this one led to valuable insights that will hopefully inform transplant surgeons to improve outcomes and potentially provide lifesaving benefits to future patients,' said his surgeon, Dr. Bartley Griffith. Bennett was the first of a handful of compassionate use xenotransplant patients. But as researchers approach clinical trials, they hope they will have a better understanding of how successful the organs can be under more typical circumstances. 'The promise of xenotransplantation is the promise of hope for our patients. A hope for the future that for too long has been uncertain. It is hope turned to possibility turned to reality. Our patients can dream again about graduations, weddings … about life. Hope should not have to be rationed,' said Dr. Jayme Locke, a professor of surgery at NYU Langone. 'Multiple shots on goal' is how geneticist Dr. David Ayares describes United Therapeutics' approach to the future of organ transplantation. This summer, the company will embark on the first FDA clinical trial of xenotransplantation. 'So instead of one-off compassionate use transplants that were very valuable in learning how to optimize and extend the survival of these patients, now we can go into a multicenter trial,' Ayares, president and chief scientific officer of Revivicor, a United Therapeutics subsidiary, told Gupta. But that still won't be enough to solve the organ shortage completely, so United Therapeutics and others in the transplant community are continuing to think farther into the future. 'I think the next thing we're going to do is … create personalized organs where we don't have to use any immunosuppression,' Montgomery said of what he expects down the road. This could mean using a pig's organ as scaffolding where scientists could seed human stem cells, or even 3D-printing organs. 'Then you have a designer organ for that person when they need it,' Montgomery said.
