The American team of surgeons had performed the experiment on a brain-dead patient. (Representative)
Washington:
US surgeons who transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a brain-dead patient announced Thursday that they have ended their experiment after a record-breaking 61 days.
The latest experimental procedure is part of a growing field of research aimed at advancing interspecies transplants, testing the technique mainly on bodies donated to science.
There are more than 103,000 people in the United States waiting for organ transplants, 88,000 of whom need kidneys.
“We have learned a lot over the past two months of close observation and analysis, and there is good reason to be hopeful for the future,” said Robert Montgomery, director of New York University’s Langone Transplant Institute, who led the operation in July.
It was the fifth so-called xenotransplant performed by Montgomery, who also performed the world’s first genetically modified pig kidney transplant in September 2021.
Tissue collected during the study indicated that a mild rejection process had begun, requiring intensification of immunosuppressive medications.
By ‘switching off’ the gene responsible for a biomolecule called alpha-gal – a key target for wandering human antibodies – the NYU Langone team was able to stop the immediate rejection.
The donor pig in this experiment came from a herd of the Virginia-based biotech company Revivicor.
The herd has also been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a meat source for people with hypersensitivity to the alpha-gal molecule, an allergy caused by certain tick bites.
These pigs are bred and not cloned, meaning the process is easier to scale up.
Early xenotransplantation research focused on harvesting organs from primates. For example, in 1984, a baboon heart was transplanted into a newborn baby known as “Baby Fae”, but she survived for only 20 days.
Current efforts are focused on pigs, which are thought to be ideal donors for humans because of their organ size, their rapid growth and large litters, and the fact that they are already raised as a food source.
In January 2022, surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical School performed the world’s first pig-to-human transplant on a living patient – this time with a heart.
He died two months after the milestone, which was later attributed to the presence of porcine cytomegalovirus in the organ.
Last week, Chinese scientists published a paper showing that they had succeeded in hybridizing pig-human kidneys in pig embryos, an alternative approach that also has the potential to one day address organ donation shortages.
But the development raised ethical concerns, especially since some human cells were also found in the pigs’ brains, experts said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
