Lawrence Faucette, the second living person to receive a genetically modified pig heart in a transplant, has died six weeks after the experimental procedure. The University of Maryland Medical Center, where the experimental procedure had been performed, said the heart began to show signs of rejection in recent days.
It appears to be in the early stages of research, tackling the square one problems of how to assemble macrostructures from living cells without damaging them, while keeping them alive, while keeping the whole thing sterile. I would say this is a concept. It has zero demonstrated practical success and is still a decade minimum away from being able to attempt to get it.
Still I think it’s an inevitable technology that we should invest in. Once we can control the development of cells through genetic manipulation, and assemble them into macrostructures, we’ll be able to do quite a lot, and there seem to be advancements on the former frontier all the time. We just don’t know how to get all those stem cells we convinced to become liver tissue together into a liver.
It appears to be in the early stages of research, tackling the square one problems of how to assemble macrostructures from living cells without damaging them, while keeping them alive, while keeping the whole thing sterile. I would say this is a concept. It has zero demonstrated practical success and is still a decade minimum away from being able to attempt to get it.
Still I think it’s an inevitable technology that we should invest in. Once we can control the development of cells through genetic manipulation, and assemble them into macrostructures, we’ll be able to do quite a lot, and there seem to be advancements on the former frontier all the time. We just don’t know how to get all those stem cells we convinced to become liver tissue together into a liver.