23rd January 2018 – Padova, Italy: TransLink Dissemination Event

During the closing meeting of the EU funded FP7 TransLink project, Azienda Ospedaliera di Padova organised a dissemination event addressed to medical professionals and students. Amongst the various speakers (the full programme is available here, Professor Galli from Avantea gave a lecture on the genome editing prospects of the pig for xenotransplantation.

TransLink is a project devoted to assessing the mid-to long-term risk factors and improve the outcome of animal (bovine/porcine)-derived Bioprosthetic Heart Valve (BHV) implants. 300,000 patients/year benefit from BHV, a major healthcare problem (second most frequent cardiac surgery). The clinical outcome of BHV implants is subject to late dysfunctions restricting their application to older or very young patients. Based on a retrospective (already computerized) and prospective cohort of approximately 3,000 BHV recipients and control patients from 3 large EU cardiac surgery groups, TransLink aims primarily to understand the possible role of recipients’ immune response (IR) against BHV as a major cause to mid-to-long term clinical dysfunction. Avantea tasks in this project were to generate pigs and cattle by genome editing and somatic cell nuclear transfer whose tissues are less immunogenic

More information on TransLink is available here: http://www.TransLinkproject.com/