A xenotransplant is the introduction of tissue, cells, or organs from a non-human species into a human. This idea has come about because of the shortage of available human donor organs, and as a possible means to treat illness or disease. An example that we are already doing is using pig heart valves to replace a defective human heart valve. Research is being done to determine if we could use an entire pig heart to replace a defective human heart. This is currently being researched using primates. There are countless other possibilities and areas of research.
There are multiple issues with xenotransplants including ethical and biological issues. Ethical issues include the idea of raising animals and harvesting their tissue for human use, and religious and philosophical objections. The major biological issue is rejection of the tissue by the human body. The tissue is foreign, and when the body recognizes foreign tissue the immune system launches a response to reject the tissue. One idea to overcome this is to genetically modify the donor organism to reduce or eliminate the possibility of rejection by the recipient. The pig heart valves I mentioned earlier are treated with a chemical before transplantation that makes the valve biocompatible with the human body.
Although promising, there are still some major issues to overcome before xenotransplants can possibly become common practice.
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