{"id":489766,"date":"2024-01-19T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/platohealth.ai\/donated-bodies-are-powering-gene-edited-organ-research\/"},"modified":"2024-01-19T07:22:55","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T12:22:55","slug":"donated-bodies-are-powering-gene-edited-organ-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/platohealth.ai\/donated-bodies-are-powering-gene-edited-organ-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Donated bodies are powering gene-edited organ research","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Hooked up to a ventilation machine, a person can be dead in the eyes of the law, medical professionals, and loved ones, yet still alive enough to be useful for medical research. Such brain-dead people are often used for organ donation, but they are also of increasing importance to the biotech world. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This week, we reported how surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania connected a pig liver to a brain-dead person<\/a> in an experiment that lasted for three days.<\/p>\n

The point was to determine whether the organ\u2014which was mounted inside a special pumping device\u2014could still do its job of cleaning up toxins from the body, and possibly lead to a new approach for helping patients with acute liver failure.<\/p>\n

Using entire bodies in this way\u2014as an experimental \u201cdecedent model\u201d\u2014remains highly unusual. But there\u2019s been an upsurge in requests for bodies as more companies start testing animal-to-human organ transplants using tissues from specially gene-edited pigs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn order to get to humans, you have to go through steps. You can\u2019t say \u2018I am going to try it tomorrow,\u2019 as you did 50 years ago,\u201d says Abraham Shaked, the surgeon at Penn who directed the experiment.<\/p>\n

To learn how common it is to use bodies as experimental models, I checked in with Richard Hasz, CEO of Gift of Life Donor Program, a nonprofit that arranges for organ donation in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and which provided Penn with the body used in the liver experiment.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n