GoKawiil
Tech News
Researchers cryopreserved pig kidneys in a glass-like frozen state—one for more than a year—then rewarmed and tested them before transplanting them into pigs. The organs regained color and produced urine, indicating they functioned after transplant. The team says it is a major step but still needs to determine whether the technique translates to human organs.
Harvard medical researchers report that donor hearts significantly older or younger than their recipients begin to change over time, taking on biological characteristics closer to the age of the body they're transplanted into. The findings suggest transplanted organs are not fixed in their original biological age but can shift after implantation.
Researchers led by Jesse Poganik at Harvard University report, in a bioRxiv preprint not yet peer-reviewed, that young donor hearts age faster once placed in older recipients, while older hearts appear to become biologically younger when transplanted into younger bodies. The team reached this conclusion by grafting extra hearts between mice of different ages and analyzing DNA methylation patterns linked to cellular ageing, and note similar patterns were examined in human transplant tissue.
The Pentagon is developing a program called Polygraph+ (or Polygraph Next) that uses AI and machine learning to score truthfulness, alongside 'standoff sensing' techniques that gather physiological data without attaching devices to a subject. Separately, new research on transplanted hearts challenges the idea that young organs can rejuvenate older recipients, complicating theories popularized by comments from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping about biotechnology extending life.
Scientists are developing gene-edited pig organs as a potential solution to the chronic shortage of human transplant organs. Researchers involved say the work could fundamentally change how transplantation is practiced if organ scarcity is eliminated.
Researchers led by Adrien Longchamp and Bohan Poganik used aging clocks to show that livers pumped with oxygen and nutrients at 34 degrees on perfusion machines became biologically younger, with roughly a 30% difference compared to non-perfused organs after adjusting for chronological age. The effect persisted even after transplantation, though biological age rose in all livers once implanted, likely due to surgical stress.
A woman who received a gene-edited pig kidney transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital last November has now gone 285 days without needing dialysis, breaking the previous 271-day record set by Tim Andrews. The kidney was engineered by eGenesis using Crispr gene editing to remove pig genes that trigger immune rejection and add human genes, and she is the fifth patient to receive one of the company's kidneys.