“In a First, Surgeons Attached a Pig Kidney to a Human, and It Worked: A Kidney Grown in a Genetically Altered Pig Functions Normally, Scientists Reported. The Procedure May Open the Door to a Renewable Source of Desperately Needed Organs”, 2021-10-10 (; similar):
So surgeons at N.Y.U. Langone Health took an astonishing step: With the family’s consent, they attached the pig’s kidney to a brain-dead patient who was kept alive on a ventilator, and then followed the body’s response while taking measures of the kidney’s function. It is the first operation of its kind. The researchers tracked the results for just 54 hours, and many questions remained to be answered about the long-term consequences of such an operation. The procedure will not be available to patients any time soon, as there are substantial medical and regulatory hurdles to overcome.
Still, experts in the field hailed the surgery as a milestone. “This is a huge breakthrough”, said Dr. Dorry Segev, a professor of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. “It’s a big, big deal.”
A steady supply of organs from pigs—which could eventually include hearts, lungs and livers—would offer a lifeline to the more than 100,000 Americans currently on transplant waiting lists, including the 90,240 who need a kidney. 12 people on the waiting lists die each day.
…The transplanted kidney was obtained from a pig genetically engineered to grow an organ unlikely to be rejected by the human body. In a close approximation of an actual transplant procedure, the kidney was attached to blood vessels in the patient’s upper leg, outside the abdomen. The organ started functioning normally, making urine and the waste product creatinine “almost immediately”, according to Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of the N.Y.U. Langone Transplant Institute, who performed the procedure in September.
…The group was involved in the selection and identification of the brain-dead patient receiving the experimental procedure. The patient was a registered organ donor, and because the organs were not suitable for transplantation, the patient’s family agreed to permit research to test the experimental transplant procedure.
…The combination of 2 new technologies—gene editing and cloning—has yielded genetically altered pig organs. Pig hearts and kidneys have been transplanted successfully into monkeys and baboons, but safety concerns precluded their use in humans. “The field up to now has been stuck in the preclinical primate stage, because going from primate to living human is perceived as a big jump”, Dr. Montgomery said.
The kidney used in the new procedure was obtained by knocking out a pig gene that encodes a sugar molecule that elicits an aggressive human rejection response. The pig was genetically engineered by Revivicor and approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a source for human therapeutics.
Dr. Montgomery and his team also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland that is involved in the immune system, in an effort to ward off immune reactions to the kidney.
After attaching the kidney to blood vessels in the upper leg, the surgeons covered it with a protective shield so they could observe it and take tissue samples over the 54-hour study period. Urine and creatinine levels were normal, Dr. Montgomery and his colleagues found, and no signs of rejection were detected during more than 2 days of observation. “There didn’t seem to be any kind of incompatibility between the pig kidney and the human that would make it not work”, Dr. Montgomery said. “There wasn’t immediate rejection of the kidney.”