PIG livers and kidneys may be given to future transplant patients instead of human organs, according to a top British surgeon. Professor Peter Morris, head of the Nuffield Department of Surgery at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, said yesterday that the rising demand for transplants and the limited number of donors meant surgeons would probably be forced to turn to animal organs. But he said general use of such organs was probably about 10 to 20 years away because scientists still had to overcome the problem of rejection by the human body. Speaking on the first full day of the biggest surgical conference to be held in Hong Kong, Professor Morris said the human body would regard transplanted animal organs as foreign matter to be attacked and destroyed by antibodies ''within minutes''. Scientists had to find a way to block this response, he said. They had already taken the first step towards doing so by creating the world's first transgenic pig in Oxford several months ago. This pig, which had been bred with some human genes, could express a human product which interfered with the body's defensive antibodies. ''But I think the use of animal organs is still a long way off,'' he said. Professor Morris said he thought the most exciting developments in organ transplantation in the near future would be better drugs to suppress the body's rejection of transplanted organs. The problem with current drugs was that they suppressed all of the body's defence mechanisms - making the patient highly vulnerable to infection. Professor Morris said future drugs would specifically target rejection of the transplanted organ. Scientists were already able to do this in animals. Other developments in this area included transplanting cells rather than whole organs to help patients with diabetes, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, for example. For diabetics, this would mean a simple injection of the cells which control glucose, which are dead in diabetic patients, instead of a complete transplant of the entire pancreas. He said survival rates for transplant patients had improved greatly - with 80 per cent of liver patients surviving the first year, and 70 per cent living for five years. But although patients were pulling through the early stages, they were suffering long-term rejection problems, and higher heart disease and cancer rates. More than 2,500 leading surgeons are attending the 35th World Congress of the International Society of Surgery, which runs at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre until Friday.
