When he was a heart surgeon, David Cooper would have 140 patients referred to him for transplants each year; because of the shortage of donor organs, only about 25 would receive them. Now an academic researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Cooper is part of a broad effort to search for ways to use pig organs for human transplants. Without extremely high levels of im-munosuppressive drugs, pig organs seldom last for half an hour in, say, baboons. The organs swell up and turn black and must be removed quickly, or the animals may die. Cooper led a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School and Im-merge Biotherapeutics in determining what would happen when hearts from pigs genetically modified to seem less "piglike" to a foreign immune system were transplanted into baboons.
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