Pigs. Credit: or titanium22. CC BY-SA 2.0
It used to be that nothing was certain but death and taxes. Now scientists have taken a step that casts some doubt on the former claim. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, Yale University researchers described a technology for restoring significant organ activity in pigs that had died of a cardiac arrest an hour before. The main goal for the work, they say, will be to improve the harvesting of organs for transplant, but the technique could also potentially be used to revive, for example, drowning victims.
Using a “device similar to a heart-lung machine” and a fluid containing the animals’ blood and a variety of drugs, including anticoagulants, the Yale team was able to observe several signs of restored function in the dead pigs, including heart contraction and some liver and kidney activity. Their hearts were contracting (though not fully beating), their organs were showing signs of metabolism, and genes responsible for cellular repair were active. “These cells are functioning after they should not be,” Nenad Sestan, a Yale University professor and one of the authors of the new study told The Wall Street Journal.
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