Pig Cells Revived an Hour After Death, Can this be Done on Humans?

An hour after a pig's death, scientists were able to resuscitate its cells, marking a possible advance in organ transplantation. The technology could one day be used for human organs.

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(Photo : Photo: Andrew Martin / Pixabay)

The pigs' hearts, brains, and livers were still beating even after they had been dead for an hour.

How they did it

By connecting recently deceased pigs to a system of pumps, filters, and flowing fluids, scientists can now keep the dying organs of the animals alive. This new method is called OrganEx. This treatment ensures that specific cellular processes in the animals' vital organs continue, not that the animals' brain functions are restored or that the pigs are brought back from the grave.

According to recent research that was released on Wednesday, August 3, in the journal Nature, the technology may one day be used to help maintain and recover donated human organs intended for use in transplant surgeries (opens in new tab). By reversing the effects of ischemia in donated organs, which occurs when an organ sustains damage due to insufficient blood flow and oxygen delivery, this procedure may increase the number of organs that are accessible for transplant.

In addition, Dr. Robert Porte, a professor in the department of surgery at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study, wrote in an accompanying commentary(opens in new tab) of the work that such a device could theoretically also be used in living humans to treat ischemia that happens during a stroke or heart attack.

The technique won't be used on live people or donated organs anytime soon, though.

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OrganEx Potential

Stephen Latham, director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and co-author of the study, told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday that "this is very far away from usage in people" (Aug. 2). The OrganEx system can restore some cellular activities in some organs after the blood supply to those organs has stopped; however, the extent of recovery varied between organs, as shown by the proof-of-concept experiment in pigs.

Before experimenting with this on a person who has had anoxic damage, or organ damage caused by a lack of oxygen, Latham said, "we'd need to research [in] a lot more detail the degree to which ischemia damage is undone in different kinds of organs."

Dr. David Andrijevic, an associate research scientist in neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine and a co-first author of the study, stated at the briefing that the team intends to study OrganEx in numerous additional animal studies "before even thinking about translating" the technology to humans.

A Novel Follow-Up

The current study expands upon a prior study that was published in 2019 in the journal Nature, in which the researchers used a scaled-down variation of the same system to partially restore cellular and metabolic activity in the brain of a pig that had been severed during food production.