Sialic acid and xenotransplantation

With the dearth of organs available across the globe to meet the requirements of the organ recipients and the need for organs scaling high across the globe, xenotransplantation finds importance. However, it has challenges in different aspects of encompassing infection, challenges posed by sialic acid expression in other than human animal donors, rejections, complement-mediated lysis, and generating immune reaction and eventual rejection. Although different strategies of knockout (KO) transplantation donors are being searched for to provide increased life to the graft from the donor animal in human, the area needs further research. We discuss in this chapter the state of art with focus on the role of sialic acids on xenotransplantation, generation of KO, application of genetic engineering and genome editing tools in the generation of xenotransplantation donor animals with the aim to increase the life of the graft in the human host for a longer period of time.