Experts split on pig cell injection diabetes treatment
Baku, December 18 (AZERTAC). Pig cells could be injected into Australians next year after authorities lifted a ban on animal to human transplants.
The National Health and Medical Research Council yesterday said clinical trials involving animal to human transplants could proceed, once regulations had been put in place.
But critics warn it could create dangerous new disease epidemics in humans.
Living Cell Technology, which is running trials using cells from pigs to treat humans with type 1 diabetes in New Zealand and Russia, will expand into Melbourne or Sydney.
New Zealand-based Living Cell Technology medical director Prof Bob Elliot said he hoped to have an application approved for the trials by the end of this year, so they could begin next year or in 2011.
"Importantly for Australia, it does open up the field for others who have probably been discouraged by the moratorium," Prof Elliot said.
For his trials, disease-free pigs were bred, which meant the risk of transmitting viruses to humans was "vanishingly small", he said.
Results of the nine type 1 diabetes patients transplanted with pig cells had varied from having no effect, to reducing insulin doses, to an apparent cure, he said.
Experiments were also under way to work out if similar approaches could be used to treat Parkinson`s disease and severe hearing problems, and in the longer term, Alzheimer`s disease and stroke. Pigs were used because they were remarkably similar to humans, he said.
But Melbourne medical ethicist Assoc Prof Nicholas Tonti-Filippini said there was still a huge risk of transmitting animal diseases to humans, especially if organs were transplanted.
"They run a huge risk of creating new diseases in humans that haven`t been seen in humans before," he said.
To allow animal organs and tissue to be transplanted into humans without being rejected by the immune system, the animals genes needed to be altered.
"Some animal genes that the human body would reject need to be removed, and you need to put in human genes, which would have the human body accept that tissue as human tissue," he said.
Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation research manager Dorota Pawlak welcomed the decision to lift the ban.
"When used under strict ethical and scientific guidelines, xenotransplantation techniques have the potential to save the lives of thousands of people every year," Dr Pawlak said.
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