The Scientific Study of Xenografting: 1964–1988

Abstract

The early clinical efforts at xenografting described by Reemtsma in Chap. 1 [1-4] and several additional efforts reported by Hitchcock [5], Starzl [6,7] and Hardy [8,9] were prompted by the shortage of human organs for transplantation at a time when there were few alternatives for treating end-stage organ failure. While none of these efforts achieved 1-year graft or patient survival, they did come close in several cases. Thus they demonstrated the potential for successful xenogeneic transplantation. Shortly after these first efforts, the concept of “brain death” became widely accepted, greatly increasing the supply of human organs for clinical transplantation and removing the principal justification for the use of animal organs. Thus only a few sporadic attempts at clinical xenogeneic transplantation were attempted over the next 25 years. However, one of the apparent consequences of this early chnical effort was to spark scientific interest in xenogeneic transplantation. Figure 3.1 shows the increased number of scientific publications involving xenografting which followed Reemtsma’s clinical effort. That interest lasted almost a decade before the frustrations of finding solutions to the problems and the lack of need for animal donors led to a dechne in the research effort.