Medical Breakthroughs, Research, and News

[SubGod22]

More kidney hope

For First Time, Pig Kidneys Provide Life-Sustaining Organ Function in Human: Hope for 100,000 on Donor List

For the first time, genetically modified pig kidneys provided “life-sustaining kidney function” during the course of a planned seven-day clinical study—a first step in addressing the critical crisis worldwide of kidney donor organ shortage.

The University of Alabama’s pre-clinical human study at Birmingham also advances the science and promise of xenotransplantation as a therapy to potentially cure end-stage kidney disease—just as a human-to-human transplants can.

“It has been truly extraordinary to see the first-ever preclinical demonstration that appropriately modified pig kidneys can provide normal, life-sustaining kidney function in a human safely and be achieved using a standard immunosuppression regimen,” said UAB transplant surgeon scientist Jayme Locke, M.D., director of UAB’s Comprehensive Transplant Institute and lead author of the paper.

“The kidneys functioned remarkably over the course of this seven-day study,” she said. “We were able to gather additional safety and scientific information critical to our efforts to seek FDA clearance of a Phase I clinical trial in living humans and hopefully add a new, desperately needed solution to address an organ shortage crisis responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year.”

The peer-reviewed findings published last month in JAMA Surgery describes the pioneering pre-clinical human research performed on a recipient experiencing brain death by the Locke and Heersink School of Medicine team. It comes 19 months after last year’s groundbreaking peer reviewed UAB xenotransplant study in which genetically modified pig kidneys were successfully transplanted into a recipient after brain death.

[shoxlax]

Serious question: would someone whose religion forbid pork take a pig kidney transplant if it was the only life saving choice?

[Kung Wu]

Serious question: would someone whose religion forbid pork take a pig kidney transplant if it was the only life saving choice?

If it was an Iraqi cleric needing the pig kidney there would be a Fatwah faster than fast explaining why it's okay.

[SubGod22]

Some interesting research on bats that could lead to a healthier human down the road.

Bats Hold Vital Clues for Cancer Prevention as Scientists Study Their 'Extraordinary' Immunity

A new study shows that bats evolved to avoid cancer and the data may uncover how humans can treat or prevent viruses as well as cancer.

A rapid evolution in bats, the only winged mammal, may account for their “extraordinary” ability to both host and survive infections and even to avoid cancer—and that success is in their genes.

Bats are exceptional among mammals for not only their ability to fly but also their long lives, low cancer rates, and robust immune systems.

The ability of bats to tolerate viral infections may stem from unusual features of their innate immune response—and these characteristics may have implications for human health.

For example, by better understanding the mechanisms of the bat immune system that allow bats to tolerate viral infections, researchers may be better able to prevent disease outbreaks from animals to people.

Comparative genomic analyses of bats and cancer-susceptible mammals may eventually provide new information on the causes of cancer and the links between cancer and immunity. Studies of bats and other organisms complement studies based on mouse models; mice are more amenable than bats to experimental manipulation but exhibit fewer characteristics with implications for human disease.

In a paper published in Genome Biology and Evolution by Oxford University Press this week, researchers used the Oxford Nanopore Technologies long-read platform, and bat samples collected with help from the American Museum of Natural History in Belize, to sequence the genomes of two bat species—the Jamaican fruit bat and the Mesoamerican mustached bat.

The researchers at of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York carried out a comprehensive comparative genomic analysis with a diverse collection of bats and other mammals.

[SubGod22]

Peanut and Food Allergies May Be Reversed with Compound Produced by Healthy Gut Bacteria

Why do we need fiber? it feeds the bacteria in our gut, which in turn produces something that could prevent food allergies and irritations such as those triggered by peanuts, a study this year showed.

A short-chain fatty acid called butyrate is produced by Clostridium bacteria in our stomach as they ferment fiber that reinforces the walls of the GI tract and protects against colon cancer, among other things.

In a mouse model, researchers at the University of Chicago used an oral solution of butyrate to stymie a life-threatening anaphylactic response in the allergic animals when they were exposed to peanuts.

Without enough fiber in the diet, humans can experience die-offs of these beneficial, butyrate-producing gut microbes. Too much eating of simple sugars and carbs instead makes room for harmful species, resulting in a condition known as “gut dysbiosis.”

Without butyrate, the gut lining can become permeable, and bits of food leak out of the GI tract and into circulation, triggering an anaphylactic response in one pattern of allergic reactions.

One of the ways to rapidly treat this has been a microbiome transplant, also known unpleasantly as a fecal biota transplant. But this has had mixed results in the lab, said Dr. Jeffery Hubbell, Ph.D., one of the project’s principal investigators.

“So we thought, why don’t we just deliver the metabolites like butyrate that a healthy microbiome produces?” he said in a news release.

Hubbell and his colleagues at the University of Chicago did just that in a mouse model in early 2023, but the solution is vile to taste and smell, so a new configuration of polymers that cloak the butyrate has been developed by him and his team.

The researchers administered these “polymer micelles” to the digestive systems of mice lacking either healthy gut bacteria or a properly functioning gut lining.