Transplant medicine could take a giant leap forward if donor organs could soak up oxygen for longer and decay delayed. A technology called OrganEx, described in Nature from a team at Yale, promises to do just that. The researchers stopped the hearts of pigs and an hour later used OrganEx, then cataloged the return of bodily functions. The new approach far exceeded the ability of existing technology to prolong organ viability.
Popular Pigs
Pigs have long been a popular animal model of human disease because they are about our size and their hearts and blood vessels are quite similar. They have also had fictional roles in medicine.
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