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Recent studies have shown that even though about 50 percent of adults in the United States have registered as organ donors, more than 100,000 people in the United States are waiting for a transplant and many will die waiting. The increasing scarcity of human organ donors has driven research scientists to examine other options, such as xenotransplantation, to generate essential human transplantable organs.
Xenotransplantation experiments, generating human organs in animals for transplantation, are being conducted in sheep, pigs, and, recently, in nonhuman primates. Last month, a group of scientists from Spain and the US began to examine the use of monkeys as animal hosts to produce human organs. According to the published reports, the research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues.” Xenotranplantation experiments rely on applying gene editing and stem cell biology technologies to address the potential of tissue rejection by the recipient’s immune ...
