Xenotransplantation offers a solution to this increasing problem. The downsides of brain death A major advantage of xenotransplantation is that it offers a means to obtain organs from a living healthy animal rather than from a dead person, whose organs will always have a certain amount of damage resulting from the death. Even organs from brain dead patients, who are considered ideal candidates for organ transplant, usually have a certain amount of damage. As a result, some of the organs we transplant are not in an ideal state. Cooper's research focuses on the pig as a source of organs for humans.
Pigs offer many advantages as donors for humans.
So far, researchers have managed to employ pig livers, but only externally and not implanted in the body, to cleanse the blood of toxins in a small number of patients with severe liver failure. As for the actual transplantation of pig organs into humans, there are a number of problems still to be overcome, and xenotransplantation is some way from becoming a workable practice. The biggest problem is organ rejection. Pigs have a galactose sugar on the surface of their blood vessels that is the target for antibodies in the human immune system, which attach to the transplanted pig organ and lead to its rapid destruction. The antibodies in the blood bind to the sugar.