Doctors Call Use of Baboon Livers ‘Bad Medicine’

A group of 3,000 doctors asked the University of Pittsburgh on Saturday to stop transplanting baboon livers into humans, calling the experiments “bad medicine and bad science.”

“The success rate of these operations is 0% so far,” said Dr. Wendy Thacher, a spokeswoman for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, which promotes preventive medicine and alternatives to research that involves animals.

Two patients have died after receiving baboon livers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The second patient, a 62-year-old man, died Friday night of a massive infection in his abdomen, 26 days after the transplant.

The first patient, a 35-year-old man who had the HIV virus, lived 70 days last year before dying of bleeding in the brain that was caused by a quick-moving blood infection. The infection began in his liver, doctors said.

“The need for these patients to take drugs to prevent rejection is so great they are getting infections that are killing them,” Thacher said.

Both men in Pittsburgh had received drugs that helped their bodies accept the animal organ. Doctors said the drugs made the patients extremely susceptible to infections.

Thacher also said the doctors’ committee is concerned that baboons may carry unknown viruses that could harm the patients. She said tests can identify two such viruses, but more could exist.

The baboons that provided the livers for the transplants were raised for that purpose at a colony in San Antonio.

Researchers’ efforts would be better spent on improving the nation’s organ donation network or improving other treatments for diseases such as hepatitis B, Thacher said.

Both men who received baboon livers were dying of hepatitis B, which doctors said would have destroyed a replacement human liver. Baboons are believed to be immune to hepatitis.

Doctors at the medical center have approval to perform two more baboon-to-human liver transplants.

Lisa Rossi, a spokeswoman for the medical center, said the doctors won’t perform another transplant until they study autopsy results on the second patient. Neither patient has been identified.

Dr. John Fung, a member of the transplant team in both cases, said researchers are somewhat frustrated even though both livers have worked properly. Fung said there are no apparent similarities between the two deaths.

About 20 people from several animal rights groups picketed Saturday near the home of Dr. Thomas Starzl, who oversees transplants at the university but did not participate in the operations.

Starzl, director of the medical center’s Transplantation Institute, said the university will continue its research into transplanting baboon livers into humans.

About 2,500 people died in 1991 while waiting for organs, mostly hearts and livers, the United Network for Organ Sharing said.