Advantages and Disadvantages of Xenografts

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A xenograft is the transplantation of a tissue (be it an entire organ or simply a part of it such as a bit of skin) from one species to another, examples include transplanting a transplanting heart valves from pigs or cows into humans to replace a defective valve in the human. Certain factors have to be taken into consideration when doing a xenograft, these include; the size of the organ, the longetivity of the organ, hormone and protein differences, body temperature of donor animal relative to human core body temperature, and environment (for example normal hydrostatic pressures at which the hearts function). There are numerous advantages and disadvantages involved in xenografts, advantages include the fact that there is a near infinite supply of organs to transplant into humans which would save a large amount of human lives. The organ transplant queue is also naturally quite large for human to human transplants, thus the amount of people who die waiting for organs would be saved as a result of the near infinite supply of organs from other animals. The disadvantages of xenografts are a lot more numerous which is why xenografts still isn’t the norm compared to autografts. The disadvantages include the fact that the animals that are most likely to be used for the xenograft which is most commonly pigs because of their abundance and compatibility have a shorter lifespan than humans do thus the organs that have been transplanted will only serve as a temporary fix because the organs will age faster than the rest of the human’s body thus their functions will cease before the human dies. Another disadvantage would be the transmission of a disease(xoonosis) because of the xenograft, because of the transplant the patient’s immune system is suppressed in order to stop the immune system from attacking the transplanted organ which results in a higher susceptibility of virus’s,

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