The transplant at NYU Langone Health in New York is the latest attempt in the country to use organs from animals to save people. Over 103,000 people in the United States are waiting for an organ, 88,000 of them for a kidney.
– This shows that a pig kidney – with only a genetic modification and without experimental medication or equipment – can replace the function of a human kidney for at least 32 days without rejection, says surgeon Robert Montgomery, director of the transplant center.
Montgomery first transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a human in 2021, and has done so several times since then. Unlike the latest transplant, the previous ones involved up to ten modifications.
Donated his body for scientific purposes
In the latest transplant, doctors knocked out only the gene that would otherwise cause rejection within minutes.
Both of the patient’s own kidneys were removed. The new kidney began producing urine immediately, according to the medical team. So far, no signs of rejection have occurred.
The experimental transplant was made possible by the go-ahead from the family of the 57-year-old, brain-dead man. He himself had wished to donate his body for scientific purposes.
– I have had a hard time with it before. But he liked to help others, says the man’s sister Mary Miller-Duffy.
– He will be in the medical records and thus live forever, says Miller-Duffy.
In January 2022, a pig heart was operated for the first time in the world into a living patient in Baltimore, USA. The patient, a man, died two months later. The cause was probably that a herpes virus that occurs in pigs was present in the organ.