Health: researchers resuscitate organs of dead animals

Ua new feat of medicine, synonymous with hope for organ transplants. A team of researchers has succeeded in restarting the blood circulation of several organs of pigs, which died an hour earlier. Hearts, livers and kidneys have been brought back to life, reports The Parisian. The guinea pigs, pigs weighing around 30 kg, had died before being resuscitated thanks to this operation. The ethics specialist and intensive care professor at the Clermont-Ferrand University Hospital, Jean-Étienne Bazin, is delighted: “Their organs have come back to life. »

Researchers do not wish to speak of resurrection. Rather, they evoke resuscitation, or more precisely “cell recovery”, explains Professor John De Vos, head of cellular engineering, to the daily. “Anyway, it’s unheard of and clearly progress,” he adds. The experiment, carried out on piglets in the United States by scientists from Yale University, involves restoring the animals one hour after cardiac arrest, using their blood and OrganEx. This technology is “a synthetic product composed of oxygen, drugs against cell death, nutrients, which once injected into the femoral artery will irrigate the body”, according to John De Vos.

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The success of this operation is great news for medicine, underlines the researcher. “This suggests that organs could be harvested in circumstances where today they are unrecoverable. This opens the door to transplants after unplanned deaths. But this success has its limits. On the one hand, the guinea pigs had received coagulants before dying, which “does not happen in real life”, and on the other hand, it remains to be demonstrated that the “rehabilitated” organs function correctly after their transplantation.