How pigs are helping save ill babies’ bacon
We think of medicine and surgery as being based in science, but some of the greatest advances come about as the result of quite unscientific thinking – through intuition, imagination and leaps of faith.
One of our most imaginative surgeons is Professor Paolo De Coppi of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. He magics new organs from old using pig tissue “scaffolds”, with the patient’s own stem cells growing around the scaffold to form a new organ.
His latest miracle is treating newborn babies with birth defects in this way. The first to be treated are those missing a section of their gullet or oesophagus – called Oesophageal Atresia. OA can be diagnosed with an ultrasound scan at around 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Babies will receive transplants harvested from pigs and then reengineered using the baby’s stem cells.
The revolutionary life-saving treatment will be used next year by doctors at Great Ormond Street on about 10 children born with severe cases of OA.
Transplants of various sizes have been taken from pigs at a British farm in readiness. These animal scaffolds will be modified by removing all their cells so avoiding rejection by the patient’s body.
De Coppi said: “This is completely new. Pigs have been used for heart valve replacement for many years, but nobody has received an organ developed from an animal scaffold this way.”
De Coppi has previously pioneered a landmark transplant in 2010 when a 13-year-old boy was given a new windpipe, which had been created from a deceased human donor using the teenager’s stem cells.
Stems cells are taken immediately after birth from the babies’ muscle and oesophagus. Tissue engineering of the animal scaffold takes about eight weeks, allowing implantation when the baby is two to three months old.
“We are confident we will be treating our first patients in 2018,” De Coppi said. “The focus is on newborns at the moment but in the next 10 years we hope to apply this to adults with conditions such as cancer of the oesophagus.”
He’s also working on a similar process for babies born with shortened bowels, building a new intestine from pig transplants and stem cells. He hopes to introduce it in 2020.
Ultimately De Coppi would like to treat unborn babies with congenital defects while still in the womb — including children with a diaphragmatic hernia, a hole in the diaphragm that can result in heart and lung complications.
He’ll use stem cells from the amniotic fluid to rebuild the diaphragm before the child is even born.
Phew!