Robin Pierson ’74

medicine, research
Physician
Dr. Richard “Robin” Pierson ’74 believes the day will come when pig’s cells are routinely used to help cure diabetes, and their hearts and kidneys transplanted into humans whose own organs have failed. That’s when Robin and his University of Maryland research team will know their work has paid off.

Robin and his collaborators have spent more than two decades unraveling the complex mechanisms that prevent nonhuman cells from working in human bodies. The thoracic (heart and lung) transplant surgeon believes cross-species transplantation—known as xenotransplantation—is science, not science fiction, and will eventually provide life-saving alternatives for desperately ill patients.

There are plenty of obstacles, sociological and scientific. Many people find the notion of transplanting animal cells into humans repulsive. And researchers must figure out how to outsmart the formidable human immune system while preventing potentially hazardous donor viruses from infecting their human hosts. But researchers have already cleared many of the hurdles with pigs. In recent years, scientists have figured out how to fairly reliably cure diabetes in monkeys using pig islet cells, the pancreatic cells that reverse the insulin deficiency that causes diabetes. A trial in New Zealand is testing pig islet cells in diabetic humans.

Robin is doing detective work on what he calls “the next big hurdle”: how to prevent pig cells from causing clotting in human blood. “Solving this problem could be the last frontier in the quest for successful xenografts—or could lead to another challenging scientific puzzle,” he says.

Other researchers are studying promising alternatives to xenotransplantation, using stem cells, organ regeneration, or other techniques. But Robin thinks xenotransplantation has more potential. “Taking a healthy organ from an animal,” he says, “is the obvious and very high-impact potential solution, if it can be made to work well—and I believe it can.”
Back