For three days in December, an ICU room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania bore witness to the first-ever merging of two powerful new technologies poised to change the future of transplant medicine.
On a gurney, a brain-dead patient lay connected to a whirring Rube Goldberg-esque machine: a tangle of tubes and siphons on wheels. From a cannula on one end, blood from the patient entered, was pumped full of oxygen and other nutrients, then pushed into a cozy, temperature-controlled chamber containing a liver — one that until very recently had belonged to a CRISPR-edited pig — before being returned to the patient.
The experiment, designed to test whether a genetically engineered porcine liver kept alive in a box could support the circulatory system of a human, was a resounding success, the research team said Thursday.