Medical Spa Lawyer
Paddy Deighan, the Premier Medical Spa Lawyer

 Last month, a medical team from the University of Pennsylvania did something rather astonishing.

The medical team attached the veins of an alive, but brain dead patient to the veins to a  large machine with pig liver mounted in the middle of it. 

For three days, the man’s blood passed into the machine, through the pig liver, and back into his body.

This “extracorporeal,” or outside-the-body, liver—whose initial test is designed to help people survive acute liver failure, which can be caused by infection, poisoning, or (most commonly) too much alcohol.

A damaged liver can’t do its job removing toxins from the body, processing nutrients, and making protein. Hooking people up to an external one could buy them time.

The liver test in Philadelphia is also the latest effort to experiment with organs from pigs that have been genetically engineered so their tissues are more compatible with people.

To do that, they have all made genetic changes to pigs so that the animal tissue is cloaked from the human immune system, which would otherwise attack the organs.

But using a liver outside the body largely avoids the issue of longer-term organ rejection because it only needs to work for a few days, not years. And the gene edits made to the pigs do seem to protect the organs from severe rejection in the short term. “Here there is no complex immunology,” says Shaked. “We eliminate the rejection question because we don’t use the organ for long. It’s more like a piece of machinery.”

The idea is to use the external organ to support people with liver failure until a human liver transplant becomes available for them or until their livers bounce back, something that’s possible given the organ’s impressive ability to regenerate.

Patients who could benefit include those who overdose on painkillers or who drink too much alcohol over time and develop acute liver failure.