Answer 1:
This is a very good and hard question. Based
on your question, I think you probably already
know something about xeno transplantation,
the idea of replacing damaged human organs with a
healthy animal organ. Your question asks if we
can use animals (like pigs) to grow human organs,
which can then be used to replace a damaged
version of a human organ. The goals are similar,
and the problem that you brought up (tissue
rejection due to immune system attack) is the main
problem in all of this area of research. I'll
tell you about three areas of current research and
how scientists are hoping to overcome the
problems.
Keep in mind that the main problems
with all of these methods of organ transplantation
are tissue rejection and disease
transmission. In tissue rejection, the immune
system of the patient sees the new organ as
foreign and creates antibodies which attach and
flag the cells as invaders, causing white blood
cells to attack the transplanted tissue. This
massive immune reaction is often fatal. Putting
anything foreign into the body also creates
problems because the new tissues may carry
diseases which the body is not prepared
for, especially when the body is under stress from
the drugs associated with transplant
operations.
Let's start with your specific
idea: using cloning to grow human organs inside of
other mammals. You may have heard of stem
cells. I won't go into the biology of stem
cells here. Suffice it to say that stem cells are
completely un-specialized and can be trained to
become any type of tissue: skin, liver, heart,
muscle, stomach, etc. In theory I can grow a stem
cell colony in a Petri dish and, using hormones,
cause the colony to grow into any tissue I want.
Most cells, once they are specialized, cannot
be reset thus if I was growing skin cells in a
Petri dish I cannot add anything to make them grow
into a heart. The best human stem cells are
the first few cells of an embryo. There are
many moral problems with using these cells because
it kills the embryo. There are stem cells
found in the marrow of everyone's bones.
Although they are harder to use, they are more
powerful because harvesting them doesn't hurt
anyone much.
One set of researchers has developed a
way to put these marrow stem cells from a human
into a baby sheep still in its mothers womb. When
the sheep is born, all of its body parts will have
some characteristics of the human who donated the
marrow stem cells. In theory, if the liver of the
sheep were transplanted into the human it would
not be rejected because some portion of the cells
in the liver are derived directly from that
person. When the organ is transplanted, the
immune system is much less likely to produce
antibodies to the cells of the organ because
it seems to recognize some percentage of them as
being native.
The most successful attempts at
this have produced sheep whose organs are about
15% human cells. Researchers say it will be at
least 15 years before this technology can be
tested in human transplant patients.
Another area of study is human
cloning.
In this method, a person's DNA would be put
into a fertilized human egg which would produce
stem cells matching the DNA of the donor.
These stem cells could be grown up into an
organ which would exactly match the donor.
This dramatically reduces the likelihood
that the patients immune system would attack the
transplanted organ.
A third area of study is called xeno
transplantation. This is the most
likely one to actually begin saving people in the
next twenty years. Basically the idea is to take
an animal which produces lots of babies quickly
and change its DNA to make its organs look more
human. Pigs work well for this. You can grow
pigs in a sterile environment (reduces the risk of
infection) and then place their organs into a sick
human. The problem is tricking the humans
immune system into accepting the organ. One
success has been to replace certain pig genes with
human counterparts. These genes are the ones that
make proteins which alert the human body to the
foreign invader. In theory, these organs look
part pig and part human and very weird to the
immune system, but don't look scary enough to
cause the immune system to go on full
alert. For more
information, check out these links: Cloning Xenotransplants
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