WHY DO YOU WASH ORGANS, DR. Ott?

Donor organs are among modern medicine’s most precious resources because their availability is so limited. At present some 114,000 people in the U.S. are on a waiting list for an organ transplant, with a new name added around every 10 minutes. On average, 20 people die every day while waiting for a donor. But Austrian-born surgeon Dr. Harald Ott is hoping to put an end to the waiting. He and his team of researchers at Harvard Medical School have been working for more than 10 years on his goal: to modify animal organs to make them suitable for transplantation into human patients. The procedure may at first seem reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein and his famous monster, but Ott is at the bleeding edge of modern medicine. He starts by pumping a detergent through the organ to remove animal cells, leaving only empty scaffolding behind. Then the scaffolding is populated with a patient’s stem cells in an effort to create an organ that will not be rejected by the patient. So far Ott’s team has been using the technique on organs from pigs and rats. When ready, they are re-implanted in the host animal. While the animal rejects the organ after only a week because the cells it contains are recognized as foreign, Ott and his colleagues have demonstrated that the organs they are developing can function in a living organism. Ultimately, they hope that the technique can be used, for example, to make a pig’s lungs or heart acceptable to the body of a seriously ill human patient. Does it sound like science fiction? It isn’t. Ott believes that far greater success lies just down the road.