Pig Kidney Transplanted in Brain-Dead Human Worked for More Than a Month, Researchers Say

As the need for organ donation grows, researchers are looking for solutions.

Surgeons at NYU Langone Health announced that their experiment of transplanting a kidney from a genetically modified pig to a human body was successful for a short amount of time, according to the Associated Press. 

Doctors transplanted a single kidney from a genetically modified pig into a brain-dead man’s body, replacing both of his kidneys. The patient did not reject the organ and the kidneys worked normally for over a month, the outlet reported.

“Is this organ really going to work like a human organ? So far it’s looking like it is,” NYU Langone Transplant Institute Director Dr. Robert Montgomery told AP.

A technician replaces media in a bioreactors containing pig kidneys in a Miromatrix laboratory on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2022, in Eden Prairie, Minn.

Andy Clayton-King/AP Photo

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On Wednesday, the University of Alabama Birmingham also published a peer-reviewed study that showed that a genetically altered pig kidney, which had undergone 10 gene modifications, also worked normally inside of another brain-dead patient for a full week, per The New York Times.

Dr. Jayme Locke, who worked on the University of Alabama Birmingham study, said that they found that pig kidneys were also able to “clear enough creatinine” — waste product made by muscles — “to support an adult human.” 

“If you want to have life-sustaining kidney function, the kidneys have to do more than just make urine,” Dr. Locke said, per the Times.

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Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s transplant institute, prepares a pig kidney for transplant into a brain-dead man in New York on July 14, 2023.

Shelby Lum/AP Photo

This isn’t the first time that medical experts have experimented with xenotransplantation – or transplanting an animal organ into a human. So far only 10 experimentations have been done transplanting gene-modified organs from pigs into brain-dead patients, the outlet reported. 

In 2021, researchers at the University of Maryland transplanted a gene modified heart from a pig into a dying man’s body. He survived for two months before the organ failed, and the organ was later found to have had traces of a virus known to affect pigs, per the Times.

Dr. Locke told the publication that the next step is doing a clinical trial transplanting the modified pig organs with live patients, and are in talks with the Food and Drug Administration to do so.

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The studies come after the Centers for Disease Control reported that there were nearly 800,000 adults in the U.S. living with end-stage kidney disease and 

Kidneys are the biggest organ in need in the U.S. with over 100,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant out of the 121,678 people waiting for a lifesaving organ, per the National Kidney Foundation.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education