The 21st century is an interesting time to live in that those with damaged or malfunctioning organs can depend upon skilled surgeons to replace what ails them. In the past, those with congenital or acquired organ defects were forced to live with moderate to severe debilitations or even face death. Despite a current lack of suitable organs for many potential transplant recipients, the option exists to replace a failed body part with another.
Additionally, thanks to the efforts of many dedicated research professionals, new technology is on the way to help ease the world's organ shortage.
Organ transplantation has a surprisingly long history. Obviously, replacement was a favored technique, as it logically removed the cause of an illness. Reports of transplants date as far back as 500 B.C. in ancient China and Rome, though, they are likely legends. Skin transplants were the first promising attempts at such a procedure with records indicating varying levels of success beginning in 200 B.C. in India. Italian surgeon Gasparo Tagliacozzi performed the first verifiably successful skin autografts, and loosely understood that his failures with allografts were due to "rejection."
Centuries later, the first successful corneal transplant was performed in 1905. Beginning in 1954 with the first successful kidney transplant, a rash of new transplant techniques was developed up until the holy grail of organ transplants was achieved: the heart. New methodologies and procedures for transplanting other organs have been steadily developed ever since, including lungs, livers, bones, and even faces.
There are several different types of organ transplants. Autografts consist of harvesting a part of an organ from one's body and relocating it elsewhere. Examples of autografts include skin grafts, vein extractions, and sometimes blood (after being specially treated) or stem cells. An allograft is the removal and transfer of an organ from a donor of the same species as the recipient. Most organ transplantations today are allografts.
Many early allografts failed because of several of the body's defense mechanisms in place to protect against pathogens and infection. Unless the donor's biology is fantastically similar to the recipient's, the organ will never assimilate and will be degraded by the recipient's immune system.
Today, donors are carefully selected for compatibility, but even so, rejection is a very real risk and all organ donor recipients receive some form of immunosuppressive therapy to limit its effects.
Despite the risk of rejection inherent to allografts, xenografts are yet another form of transplantation in which organs are transplanted between dissimilar species. Heart valves from pigs are a very common xenograft.
To circumvent the problems raised by transplants other than autografts, scientists are rapidly developing a field known as "regenerative medicine." The field consists of therapies to re-grow damaged body parts, including organs, from scratch using the patient's own cells. In one experimental treatment, porcine extracellular matrix extracted from pig bladders has been used to induce regeneration of severed digits with amazing results.
Because the freshly re-grown parts are from the pre-existing cells, there are no foreign protein markers to raise red flags and trigger an immune response.
The field is in its infancy, but advances are being made rapidly. Many scientists believe current cells can be pushed to regenerate missing or damaged sections of organs without the need for allografts, including foreign stem cells.
Another possible treatment already takes advantage of 3D printing technology, using equipment similar to ink-jet printers, to print mouse heart cells into parts of a functioning mouse heart.
Similarly, researchers have already re-grown human bladders by transposing existing bladder cells onto a biodegradable "cellular scaffold." The bladder cells multiplied and eventually took over and dissolved the scaffold leaving just a bladder.
Organ sales are illegal in many parts of the world, including the United States, but sales on the blackmarket are a big business. China has been under scrutiny from human rights groups for selling illegally obtained organs from executed prisoners and unclaimed bodies. Fortunately, the prospect of regenerating organs is also developing into an incredibly lucrative endeavor that is pushing research along. A factory has already been established by Tengion manufacturing those scaffold-based human bladders. Hopefully, the worldwide organ shortage will soon be a thing of the past.
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