is there just something fundamentally different about animal hearts?
In: Biology
There are various widely fundamental differences between hearts of different animals. Firstly there is an immune system in place here looking for foreign cells trying to destroy them. We are often able to trick it to accept another human heart but even that requires a great deal of effort. Getting it to accept an animal heart would be extremely hard. For one the animals have different blood antigens, not just A, B and rhesus D. So you are dealing with a whole new set of blood type compatability problem. In addition the animal hearts are all specialized for different heart rates, different blood pressures, different blood flow, they interact with the neurons and hormones differently, etc.
But even through all of these problems we are actually working on this. Out of all the animals it happens that the one closest to humans physiological is the common farm pig. Turns out that a diet of trash food, low activity levels and high cholesterol does make us pigs. Joking aside we are able to do some transplants from pigs into humans but it requires quite a bit of work and we basically have to flush out all the pig cells first. You could not do that to the entire heart, at least not yet but we are working towards it.
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