Cardiac Xenotransplantation

Heart failure is an important medical and public health problem. Although medical therapy is effective for many people, the only definitive therapy is heart transplantation, which is limited severely by the number of donors. Mechanical devices presently are used as “bridges” to transplantation. Their widespread use may solve the donor shortage problem, but at present, mechanical devices are limited by problems related to blood clotting, power supply, and foreign body infection. Cardiac xenotransplantation using animal donors is a potential biologic solution to the donor organ shortage. The immune response, consisting of hyperacute rejection, acute vascular rejection, and cellular rejection, currently prevents clinical xenotransplantation. Advances in the solution of these problems have been made using conventional immunosuppressive drugs and newer agents whose use is based on an understanding of important steps in xenoimmunity. The most exciting approaches use tools of molecular biology to create genetically engineered donors and to induce states of donor and recipient bone marrow chimerism and tolerance in xenogeneic organ recipients. The successful future strategy may use a combination of a genetically engineered donor and a chimeric recipient with or without nonspecific immunosuppressive drugs.