China increases support for research as organ donors in short supply
Experts said that China is likely to enhance its support for research to grow human tissue and organs in animals for transplant, following a proposed lifting of a ban in the U.S. earlier this month on funding such technology, though such experiments still face moral and technical challenges.
"It will not take long for China to catch up with other countries in this type of research, but the main challenges come from people's willingness to accept a human-animal organism, or "chimeras," Liu Changqiu, a research fellow on organ donation at the Institute of Law of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday.
The research on chimeras in China mainly focuses on tissues and small organs such as skin, corneas, cartilage and islets, while there is little progress on major organs, such as hearts and lungs, as this is far more complicated and tends to cause acute rejection by the human body, said experts.
An eye institute in East China's Shandong Province successfully transplanted a bio-engineered pig cornea named Acornea, the first such product to be accredited by the China Food and Drug Administration in April 2015, into a human eye in September 2015, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
A major drawback is that there is no guarantee that viruses and disease carried by the animal will not be transmitted to the human body, said Liu. He added that hospital ethics committees are unlikely to allow clinical trials for the transplantation as those concerns remain unsettled.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a proposal to lift a ban on funding research that injects human stem cells into animal embryos in early August. The proposal has been delivered to the U.S. Federal Register and requested public comments with the deadline set on September 6, according to the NIH and Federal Register websites.
The NIH issued the funding moratorium in September 2015 concerning questions on where the human cells might go in the animal and how they might function, such as whether the human cells might contribute to the central nervous system and affect the cognition of the animal.
However, an NIH workshop in November illustrated that there is clear interest and potential in producing animal models with human tissues or organs for studying human development, disease pathology, and eventually organ transplantation.
If the funding ban is lifted, it could help patients by, for example, encouraging research in which a pig grows a human kidney for transplant, the New York Times reported on August 5.
Shortage of organs
China is likely to increase support for research on chimeras if the U.S. does lift the ban, as the success on chimeras will make the mass production of a organ possible, which is very significant in the face of severe organ shortages in China, said Jiang Jianwen, a physician and a transplantation expert at the First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University.
China is likely to boost the transplantation of artificial organs and organs grown from other organisms in the long-run, as they are better choices than using organs from human donors, Liu said.
According to a report in Nature on March 18, China invested about 3 billion yuan ($460 million) in stem cell research in the past five-year plan. Scientists said there will be a "big increase" in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), the report said.
Though China is the No.1 country in Asia and No.3 in the world in terms of the number of organs donated every year, government statistics show that about 300,000 patients need organ transplants each year. Only around 10,000 received such operations, Xinhua reported.
Facing these acute shortages, China has made huge efforts to improve the level of organ donation after it banned the use of executed prisoners' organs in January 2015.
It has developed a "fast track" system in the aviation, rail and high-speed road sectors that offers convenience for organ delivery to shorten journey times and ensure more organs are fresh on arrival.
Unlike in the U.S., it is illegal to perform such research without approval in the UK, even with private funding.
Laws introduced in the UK in January mandate extra reviews of proposals involving certain types of chimeras, including ones that would have a human appearance or features such as faces or hands, Nature reported in early August.
