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Audio Interview

Kidney xenotransplantation

Published on March 10, 2022   13 min

Other Talks in the Playlist: Research and Clinical Interviews

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Interviewer: Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Douglas Anderson, Director of Pancreas Transplantation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, that is UAB Medicine, about the recent xenotransplant of a porcine kidney into a human decedent. The experiment is reported in a paper published in the American Journal of Transplantation on 28th of January 2022. A link to the paper accompanies this interview, and it is anticipated that listeners have at least read the abstract, before accessing this interview. Dr. Anderson, thank you for sparing the time for this interview. To start, what do you believe has been established by this experiment? Dr. Anderson: Well, thank you for the invitation. I think this was a critical first step towards showing that xenotransplantation from genetically engineered pigs can potentially become a clinical reality. There have been numerous papers and mounds of research over many years by many individuals at many institutions, searching for a way to make xenotransplantation possible. As we all know, there is a desperate shortage of available organs for transplantation, and it's long been felt that animals represented a potential source to overcome that shortage. But the barriers to making that work, both technical, immunologic and otherwise, have always been quite challenging to overcome.