Revivicor
<p>excerpt via <b><i>The Future of Animal-to-Human Organ Transplants</i></b> (by Heather Hansman) September 17, 2015
"Last month, surgeons at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, managed to keep one of Revivicor’s genetically modified pig hearts alive inside a baboon’s stomach for 945 days. They were testing the baboon’s immune response to the foreign organ, not the pig heart’s ability to function as the animal’s heart. Humans share more than 90 percent of their DNA with baboons, so transplanting a pig organ into the primate is a step in the right direction."
<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/future-animal-to-human-organ-transplants-180956402/">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/future-animal-to-human-organ-transplants-180956402/</a></p>
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<p>excerpt via <b><i>Martine Rothblatt and the Human Future</i></b>
[...] “She’s an outstanding conceptual salesperson,” says her friend and fellow futurist Ray Kurzweil. ... With Kurzweil, ... Martine has invested in research, based at MIT, into stem-cell-like cancer therapies. And her friend Craig Venter, who was among the first scientists to sequence the human genome, has joined her project to raise pigs for organ transplantation into human subjects. Martine herself owns a pig farm called Revivacor, and expects to conduct a successful pig-human transplant by the end of the decade. Last year she got her pilot’s license, so that she might speedily transport pig organs to waiting human patients.<br />
... Kurzweil, who is a director of engineering at Google (which has just established a new company, Calico, devoted to life extension), is one of the nation’s most prominent popularizers of the idea of digital immortality, and Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, has contributed more than $3.5 million of his own money to ending aging. [...]
source: <a href="http://www.aboutthesky.com/smallstorm-blog/387-martine-rothblatt">http://www.aboutthesky.com/smallstorm-blog/387-martine-rothblatt</a>
[ht: <a href="http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2015/06/RIR-150605.php">RIR</a>]
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