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Últimas Notícias | 10 de março de 2022

Ano 15, Edição 013


"É uma insuficiência renal crônica. Essa aí, ou você fica fazendo hemodiálise, três vezes por semana, como eu, ou faz um transplante. Ainda bem que existe a hemodiálise, sempre agradeço. Após quatro anos, sinto-me mais animado. A doença dá uma depressão terrível, aquele cansaço. Não é moleza, não. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, não é dizer: "Que terrível, morreu". Morreu o escambau. Está aí e vai em frente, rapaz, com todo o sorriso de felicidade que tem. A ciência trabalha com essas tecnologias todas e, puxa, te dá um rim novo. Uma injeçãozinha e uma maquininha te viram o sangue de cabeça para baixo. Estou discutindo com os médicos para saber se vale a pena tentar o transplante ou se deixa para lá." (Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, ator - 1934-2006)


Man Who Received 1st Pig Heart Transplant Dies

The first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, two months after the groundbreaking experiment, the Maryland hospital that performed the surgery announced Wednesday. March 9th. David Bennett, 57, died Tuesday at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Doctors didn’t give an exact cause of death, saying only that his condition had begun deteriorating several days earlier. Bennett's son praised the hospital for offering the last-ditch experiment, saying the family hoped it would help further efforts to end the organ shortage. “We are grateful for every innovative moment, every crazy dream, every sleepless night that went into this historic effort,” David Bennett Jr. said in a statement released by the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end.”



Animal organs for life-saving transplants - Doctors for decades have sought to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Bennett, a handyman from Hagerstown, Maryland, was a candidate for this newest attempt only because he otherwise faced certain death — ineligible for a human heart transplant, bedridden and on life support, and out of other options. After the Jan. 7 operation, Bennett's son told The Associated Press his father knew there was no guarantee it would work. Prior attempts at such transplants -- or xenotransplantation -- have failed largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. This time, the Maryland surgeons used a heart from a gene-edited pig: Scientists had modified the animal to remove pig genes that trigger the hyper-fast rejection and add human genes to help the body accept the organ.


The gene-edited pig heart transplant - At first the pig heart was functioning, and the Maryland hospital issued periodic updates that Bennett seemed to be slowly recovering. Last month, the hospital released video of him watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed while working with his physical therapist. Bennett survived significantly longer with the gene-edited pig heart than one of the last milestones in xenotransplantation -- when Baby Fae, a dying California infant, lived 21 days with a baboon's heart in 1984. “We are devastated by the loss of Mr. Bennett. He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the surgery at the Baltimore hospital, said in a statement. Other transplant experts praised the Maryland team's landmark research and said Bennett's death shouldn't slow the push to figure out how to use animal organs to save human lives. “This was a first step into uncharted territory,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, a transplant surgeon who received his own heart transplant. “A tremendous amount of information” will contribute to the next steps as teams at several transplant centers plan the first clinical trials.


The need for another source of organs is huge. More than 41,000 transplants were performed in the U.S. last year, a record -- including about 3,800 heart transplants. But more than 106,000 people remain on the national waiting list, thousands die every year before getting an organ and thousands more never even get added to the list, considered too much of a long shot. The FDA-Food and Drug Administration had allowed the dramatic Maryland experiment under “compassionate use” rules for emergency situations. Bennett’s doctors said he had heart failure and an irregular heartbeat, plus a history of not complying with medical instructions. He was deemed ineligible for a human heart transplant that requires strict use of immune-suppressing medicines, or the remaining alternative, an implanted heart pump.


Organ rejection, infections and other complications are risks for any transplant recipient. Experts hope the Maryland team quickly publishes in a medical journal exactly how Bennett's body responded to the pig heart. From Bennett's experience, "we have gained invaluable insights learning that the genetically modified pig heart can function well within the human body while the immune system is adequately suppressed,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university’s animal-to-human transplant program. One next question is what evidence, from Bennett's experience and some other recent experiments with gene-edited pig organs, may persuade the FDA to allow a clinical trial — possibly with an organ such as a kidney that isn’t immediately fatal if it fails.


NYU experiments - Twice last fall, Montgomery's team at NYU got permission from the families of deceased individuals to temporarily attach a gene-edited pig kidney to blood vessels outside the body and watch them work before ending life support. And surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham went a step further, transplanting a pair of gene-edited pig kidneys into a brain-dead man in a step-by-step rehearsal for an operation they hope to try in living patients possibly later this year. Patients may see Bennett's death as suggesting a short life-expectancy from xenotransplantation, but the experience of one desperately ill person cannot predict how well this procedure ultimately will work, said ethics expert Karen Maschke of The Hastings Center. That will require careful studies of multiple patients with similar medical histories.


Transplant centers should start educating their patients now about what to expect as this science unfolds, said Maschke, who with funding from the National Institutes of Health is developing ethics and policy recommendations on who should be allowed in the first studies of pig kidneys and what they need to know before volunteering. Pigs have long been used in human medicine, including pig skin grafts and implantation of pig heart valves. But transplanting entire organs is much more complex than using highly processed tissue. The gene-edited pigs used in these experiments were provided by Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics, one of several biotech companies in the running to develop suitable pig organs for potential human transplant. (Manufacturing.Net newsletter - Carla K Johnson and Lauran Neergaard)


Dezoito professores da ESALQ ranqueados entre os 100 melhores cientistas latino-americanos

A ESAlQ/USP - Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, da Universidade de São Paulo emplacou 18 dos seus acadêmicos em ranque da América Latina dos 100 melhores cientistas agrícolas e florestais de 2022. O resultado é significativo para a mais tradicional escola, considerada referência mundial em estudos agrários. A lista intitulada “Latin America Top 100 Agriculture & Forestry Scientists 2022 é baseada no AD Scientific Index – um sistema de classificação e análise com base no desempenho científico e no valor agregado da produtividade científica dos cientistas. No resultado para este ano, o Top 100 ranqueou como melhores 20 acadêmicos da USP dos quais 18 são da ESALQ.


A classificação de cientistas - Conforme a assessoria de imprensa da ESALQ, os cientistas são classificados globalmente e por regiões: África, Ásia, Europa, América do Norte, América Latina, Oceania, Liga Árabe, EECA-Europa emergente e Ásia Central, BRICS-Brasil, Rússia, Índia, China e África do Sul, e COMESA-Mercado Comum para as Áfricas Oriental e Austral. As listagens incluem as áreas de Agricultura & Silvicultura, Artes, Design e Arquitetura, Negócios & Gestão, Economia & Econometria, Educação, Engenharia & Tecnologia, História, Filosofia, Teologia, etc.


Um quinto dos cientistas classificados são da ESALQ - “Para a ESALQ é uma honra ser tão significativamente representada em uma lista que reconhece a excelência no desenvolvimento de pesquisas na América Latina. A presença de tantos docentes é uma sinalização de que seguimos na vanguarda do conhecimento e contribuindo para uma sociedade mais justa e desenvolvida”, comentou o vice-diretor da ESALQ, professor João Roberto Spotti Lopes, um dos nomes listados na categoria Agriculture & Forestry Scientists. “É incrível perceber que praticamente um quinto dos cem pesquisadores latino americanos que se destacam nessa lista são da USP e estão na ESALQ. É uma honra fazer parte desse grupo. Parabéns a todos”, comemorou o professor do departamento de Ciências Florestais, Luiz Carlos Estraviz e Silvio Ferraz.


Os “Top” 100 - Pela ordem alfabética dos departamentos, a ESALQ figura no ranque Latin America Top 100 com: Elke Jurandy Bran Nogueira Cardoso (departamento de Ciência do Solo); Lazaro Eustáquio Pereira Peres e Beatriz Appezzzato da Gloria (departamento de Ciências Biológicas); Pedro Brancalion, Luiz Carlos Estraviz e Silvio Ferraz (departamento de Ciências Florestais); Paulo Cesar Sentelhas (departamento de Engenharia de Biossistemas); Celso Omoto, João Roberto Spotti Lopes, José Djair Vendramim e Roberto Zucchi (departamento de Entomologia e Acarologia); Lilian Amorim e Luis Eduardo Aranha Camargo (departamento de Fitopatologia e Nematologia); Ricardo Antunes Azevedo e Marcio de Castro Silva Filho (departamento de Genética); Durval Dourado, Júlio Marcos Filho e Pedro Jacob Christoffoleti (departamento de Produção Vegetal). O campus Luiz de Queiroz, da USP em Piracicaba, também está representado por Marisa de Cássia Piccolo, do CENA-Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura.


Mérito de docentes da ESALQ - Também tiveram reconhecido o mérito em outras categorias para a América Latina os professores Demóstenes Ferreira da Silva Filho (departamento de Ciências Florestais), na categoria Arts, Design and Architecture / Urban Planning; Ana Lúcia Kassouf (departamento de Economia, Administração e Sociologia), na categoria Economics & Econometrics / Economia do Bem-estar social; Severino Matias Alencar (departamento de Agroindústria, Alimentos e Nutrição), na categoria Engineering & Technology / Food Science and Engineering; João Lúcio de Azevedo (departamento de Genética), na categoria Biodiversidade, microbiologia, genética de micro-organismos. Reynaldo Luiz Victoria (categoria Engineering & Technology / Nuclear Engineering) e Luiz Antonio Martinelli (categoria Natural Sciences/Biological Science), ambos do CENA/USP, também figuram nas listagens. (Jornal de Piracicaba - Cristiane Bonin)



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