This Little Piggy Went to Market: The Xenotransplantation and Xenozoonose Debate

TLDR

New biotechnologies are rapidly entering commercial use faster than regulators can keep pace, creating tension exemplified by debates over xenotransplantation, which involves transplanting animal cells, tissues, or organs into humans and faces formidable natural immune barriers that typically cause rejection and graft failure. The study aims to discuss applications of xenograft technology and their associated clinical, ethical, and policy implications. The author reviews xenograft technology applications, identifying the risks, ethical concerns, and policy issues they raise. The authors note a divide between those who want to proceed cautiously and those who want immediate action, and acknowledge uncertainty about the risks, benefits, and unintended consequences of xenotransplantation.

Abstract

New technologies are changing our lives radically and quickly. New biotechnologies are moving to commercial uses faster than government regulators or private citizens can monitor. This tension manifests itself in the current debates over xenotransplantation technologies in medicine. The possibility of removing cells, tissues, and organs from animals and transplanting them into human beings is startling and unnerving. Natural immunesystem barriers between species, and even between individuals within a species, are formidable. Typically, transplantation results in violent rejection and death of the grafted organ. But despite the natural barriers to transplantation, xenotransplantation aims specifically to overcome them. In this paper, I will discuss applications of xenograft technology, which raises clinical risks, ethical concerns, and policy issues. I conclude with a set of specific recommendations. As a recent letter to the journal Nature puts it, there is a “split between those who want to get it right, and those who want to get it right now.” No one knows what all the risks, benefits, and unintended consequences of xenotransplantation will be.