The Germans at the Munich facility are in the less-is-more camp. The pigs they work with have three key genetic modifications originally made more than a decade ago—all designed to keep baboons and humans from rejecting their organs. Knocking out a gene that produces a sugar called galactosyltransferase prevented the recipient’s immune system from immediately rejecting an organ from a different species. The second change added a gene expressing human CD46, a protein that helps the immune system attack foreign invaders without overreacting and causing autoimmune disease; the third introduced a gene for a protein called thrombomodulin, which prevents the blood clots that would otherwise destroy the transplanted organ.
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In 2018, the hearts of pigs from the Munich center were transplanted into 14 baboons. Two of the monkeys survived for six months, the longest any animal has lived with a heart from another species. In a report in Nature last December, the German researchers described their achievement as “a milestone on the way to clinical cardiac xenotransplantation.”
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