Word: transplante
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...Glaspy, still unaware that Christy was a Health Net subscriber, agreed that a transplant was an option. If she wanted it, he said, she could have it. "In the part of medicine where there are uncertainties," Dr. Glaspy says, "I think we have a sacred responsibility to explain those uncertainties to patients, and we also should allow them to use their values and where they're coming from to pick among the treatment options that are rational." He could not wholeheartedly recommend a transplant in her case, he says, but a transplant "was on the rational list." First, however...
...ever had to worry about such potential hazards before, because scientists hadn't been able to figure out how to make an animal-to-human transplant work. It's hard enough to trick an individual's immune system into accepting tissues from another person. But when organs from an entirely different species are stitched into the human body, immune defenses go into overdrive, leading to swift and irreparable destruction of the foreign tissue. Two years ago, when doctors at the University of Pittsburgh transplanted baboon livers into two seriously ill patients, both men died soon after the operation...
...strain of pigs. As a result, the researchers managed to fool the immune systems of three baboons into accepting pig hearts, for a short while at least. Using a similar technique, the British biotechnology company Imutran has produced a herd of 300 genetically altered swine. The company expects to transplant either a pig's heart or a liver into a human subject later this year...
Considering all the potential problems with baboon transplants, it's a wonder the FDA allowed Getty to undergo the operation at all. Certainly compassion for a dying man played a role. But according to scientists who are familiar with how such decisions are made, there was probably another, more subtle reason. "The chance of that bone-marrow transplant taking [hold] and working in a human is zero," says Ronald Desrosiers, professor of microbiology at Harvard Medical School. Current techniques, he believes, are simply not yet refined enough for it to work. But they could be soon...
Still, nothing could have prepared him for his latest, and possibly greatest, fight. It took more than a year and some intense lobbying for Getty to win the right to become the first AIDS patient to receive a baboon bone-marrow transplant. He overcame the last bureaucratic hurdle in August, when the Food and Drug Administration agreed to allow Getty, and Getty alone, to undergo the procedure. Then in the fall, he developed potentially fatal pneumocystis pneumonia, which postponed the transplant until December...