UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

Pig-to-human transplants in development

LONDON, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Pig organs genetically altered for use as transplant organs in humans could be ready in three years, British researchers said.

However, researcher Robert Winston said the first hospital transplants of pig organs into humans were probably 10 years off because of rigorous testing, The Mirror reported.

"This is very exciting technology," said Winston, head a team working to develop a strain of mini-pig with a heart, kidney and liver a human body wouldn't reject. "Potentially we could have organs which might be transplantable in two or three years."

Once perfected, the genetically altered pigs could be bred to provide a limitless supply of organs, Winston told the British newspaper.

"Essentially if you wait for a transplant you wait for someone to die in a car crash," he said. "The pig offers some special possibilities."

Bone-marrow transplant promising for AIDS

BERLIN, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- A German doctor expressed surprise that an AIDS patient shows no sign of the fatal virus after receiving a bone-marrow transplant for leukemia.

The patient, an American living in Berlin, is recovering from the leukemia therapy. Doctors said they have not been able to detect the virus in his blood in more than 600 days, even though he stopped stopped taking conventional AIDS medications, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

"I was very surprised," said the Dr. Gero Hutter.

The breakthrough may lie in Hutter's procedure of replacing the patient's bone marrow cells with those from a donor with a naturally occurring genetic mutation rendering, his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, the Journal said.

While warning that the German case could be a stroke of luck, Nobel prize winner David Baltimore called it "a very good sign" and a virtual "proof of principle" for gene-therapy approaches. Baltimore, who won the prize for his research on tumor viruses, and a University of California-Los Angeles colleague developed a gene therapy strategy against HIV that works in a similar way to the Berlin method.

Report: Overdose kills 1 European an hour

LISBON, Portugal, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- One person every hour died of a drug overdose last year in Europe, a monitoring organization said in its annual report.

The European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addition, based in Lisbon, Portugal, said drug use, while still high, remained stable in 2007, even though cocaine use rose in some countries, the EU Observer reported.

Concerning drug overdoses, the center said young people were the most vulnerable.

"We estimate there are 7,000 to 8,000 drug-induced deaths in Europe per year," said Wolfgang Gotz, the center's director. "In simple terms, we can say that one of our citizens dies per hour because of an overdose."

The majority of the deaths were heroin-related, Gotz said, but some could be traced to cocaine.

Marijuana was the most consumed illicit drug in Europe, with some 71 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 having tried it at least once in their lives and 23 million using it in the past year, the report said.

Cocaine use increased in seven European Union member countries. The annual report indicated 3.5 million Europeans used cocaine in the last year.

Ancient yew DNA preserved in hedge project

EDINBURGH, Scotland, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Clippings from a centuries-old yew in Scotland will help form the world's first DNA yew hedge at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, garden officials said.

The mile-long hedge will include more than 2,500 genotypes of yews taken from the DNA of ancient trees across the Great Britain, as well as from other parts of the world where it is becoming endangered, The Scotsman reported Friday.

One of the specimens is the Fortingall Yew -- estimated to be between 2,000-5,000 years old -- that grows in a churchyard of Scottish village of Fortingall.

Massive clearing efforts to harvest yews because of their medicinal properties -- the bark can be harvested for the cancer drug taxol -- plus the danger of disease are prompting horticulturalists to preserve the yew's DNA, the newspaper reported.

"This is a very exciting project drawing attention to a species which is involved in the fight against cancer," said Tom Christian, head of the Yew Conservation Hedge Project. "But what we don't know is that there may be a yew species which has mutated which could produce an even more powerful drug which may be a cure for HIV."