UAB awarded grant to study xenotransplantation
The University of Alabama at Birmingham Comprehensive Transplant Institute has been awarded a five-year, $19.5 million grant from the biotechnology company United Therapeutics Corporation to launch a Xenotransplantation Program, UAB reported on its website. Both groups said they hope the research will lead to genetically modified kidney transplants from pig models to humans by 2021.
It doesn't surprise me that UAB received this grant. Some background: I decided to list with UAB in 1988 although living in Atlanta which had 2 kidney transplant programs. I knew this was the right decision, especially after meeting with Arnold Diethelm, MD, then the lead kidney transplant surgeon and Chairman of the Dept. of Surgery at UAB. I like Dr. Diethelm's philosophy of performing biopsies only as a last resort and having patients taking the least amount of antirejection/immuno drugs necessary to keep the transplant going. I received a CAD transplant in 1990 and at the end of the first year Dr. Diethelm gave me the option of completely phasing out prednisone. I chose to stay on 5 mg. a day with no side effects.
Anyway, I got to know Dr. Diethelm pretty well. As president of the Atlanta AAKP chapter, I had him come speak at a monthly meeting. I remember during the Q and A, someone asked Dr. Diethelm what could be done to increase organ donation. His answer: even if every person who signed a donor card could have their kidneys used and those who didn't sign a card had their family members give consent, there would still be a huge shortage. There would always be more demand than supply, especially as the transplant meds became more sophisticated. The future is in XENOTRANSPLANTATION. Mind you, this was his answer sometime around 1991!
Here is a partial transcript from an interview Dr. Diethelm gave in 2007 discussing xenotransplantation. His is an intersting story as a transplant pioneer who also contracted Hep. C in 1964 and had a liver transplant at age 70 in 2000. Link follows...
"Arnold Diethelm: Well any advice I give would not be very good and I think that the field of transplantation is caught in a quagmire. Its success has been so tremendously valuable that there is no doubt that if one can receive a kidney transplant or a liver transplant, they are much the better for it. The problem is in not enough organs. And the shortage of organs has become the major obstacle as I see it. And when you just think of people that die from liver disease that could be helped or if the people on dialysis, hundreds and hundreds or people have nothing to look forward to every day but another day on the machine. So I think the solution to this is a xenograft.
And I remember a very prominent transplant surgeon, I won’t mention his name, said the xenograft is just around the corner and it will probably will always be just around the corner. I don’t... I think he was a bit pessimistic at that moment. And I do think if you think of the xenograft of today, it's not any more of a futuristic concept than cadaver transplantation was when I was at the Brigham, which it was almost unsuccessful. We had one or two patients that survived. So I think if I were a young person, I'd take a very hard look at the field of xenograft.
Steve Bynon: What role do you think the society should provide in the future of transplantation in this county? Which direction should they take, do you think?
Arnold Diethelm: I think the most important thing is to have a very good program every year or twice a year and address complicated questions and try to stimulate the younger people to think about it. There is a tendency to avoid hard questions. And I used to in one of my more pessimistic moods; I would look at programs, not just the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, but other, and see how many papers were on the program that had very little importance. And then the really difficult papers, there were very few. And it's not surprising, it's hard. It's very hard to deal with the difficult questions and I think the xenograft is sort of in that position. ..."
https://asts.org/about-asts/chimera-chronicles/profiles/arnold-gil-diethelm-md 
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