Cardiac Xenotransplantation: a New Frontier for Advanced Heart Failure

Purpose of reviewCardiac transplantation is a critical treatment for patients with advanced heart failure, offering the ability to markedly improve quality and quantity of life. Unfortunately, this treatment is limited by donor organ availability, despite efforts to increase organ supply and improve donor organ allocation and usage. The transplantation of non-human donor organs (xenotransplantation) offers to readily address many limitations of the current transplantation system; however, scattered attempts to establish this practice have been met with frustration. In this review, we discuss the limitations of the historical attempts and outline recent progress in the field of cardiac xenotransplantation.Recent findingsThe advent of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing techniques and emerging commercial and regulatory alignment has led to a flurry of new attempts to establish xenotransplantation as a viable treatment for those with end-stage heart failure. The first xenotransplantation of a genetically modified pig heart to a human recipient on January 7, 2022, highlighted the progress the science of xenotransplantation has made, as well as the need to outline next steps to further establish the practice.The development of a genetically modified porcine model has renewed hope that xenotransplantation might succeed where prior attempts failed, though many barriers remain.

Automated summary

Cardiac transplantation is a critical treatment for advanced heart failure patients, but limited by organ availability. Xenotransplantation, the transplantation of non-human donor organs, has the potential to overcome these limitations, but previous attempts have been unsuccessful. Recent progress in genetically modified pig models and the use of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing techniques have renewed hope for the success of xenotransplantation.