GROWING hearts, kidneys, livers and lungs in the lab is still a long way off, despite the ballyhoo that greeted last week’s news that a Colombian woman had been fitted with a segment of windpipe made partly from her own stem cells.
A more practical and achievable alternative is now emerging, based on refining the work of the ultimate tissue engineer, Mother Nature herself. Great leaps have been made in “humanising” pig organs for transplantation (see “Saved by a pig’s heart?”).
Researchers are now much closer to disguising pig organs through genetic tinkering, to prevent them from being attacked…
