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REVIEW article
Front. Transplant.
Sec. Transplantation Immunology
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frtra.2025.1568910
This article is part of the Research Topic Decedent Model vs Primate Model - Do We Know Enough? View all 3 articles
2025: Status of Cardiac Xenotransplantation including preclinical models
Provisionally accepted
Guerard W Byrne 1,2*
Christopher GA McGregor 1,2- 1 University of Minnesota Twin Cities, St. Paul, United States
- 2 University College London, London, England, United Kingdom
Xenotransplantation offers an opportunity to radically change the availability of organs for life saving human transplantation. Great progress has been made in porcine donor genetic engineering to reduce the immunogenicity of pig organs and potentially enhance their resistance to antibody mediated rejection. There is also growing insight into more effective immune suppression regimens. These advances have improved the duration of cardiac xenograft survival in non-human primates over the last decade and supported recent approval of first-in-human clinical use of pig hearts and kidneys for transplantation. This review critically examines preclinical and clinical results in cardiac xenotransplantation. We identify challenges which remain to achieving consistent and durable clinical graft survival. We discuss the relative value of preclinical non-human primate and human decedent transplant models to optimize patient cross matching, immune suppression, post-operative monitoring and graft survival.
Keywords: xenotransplantation, Cardiac, Antibody Mediated Rejection (ABMR), decedent model, Genetic Engineering
Received: 30 Jan 2025; Accepted: 28 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Byrne and McGregor. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Guerard W Byrne, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, St. Paul, United States
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