For the first time, a pig kidney has been transplanted into a human without the organ being immediately rejected. Doctors in New York used a pig kidney whose genes had been altered to no longer contain the molecule that leads to direct rejection in the human body.
“What they probably did was insert certain human proteins into the pig’s gene. When an organ is transplanted, it is not immediately recognized as foreign by the immune system and is not rejected,” says Ian Alwayn, professor of transplant surgery at Leiden University. University Medical Center.
He calls it “groundbreaking” that pig organs have now been transplanted into a human for the first time. “This has been done successfully in monkeys before, but this is a breakthrough.”
Kidney outside the body
The person who received the organ is a brain-dead patient with kidney failure. Her family agreed to the experiment before she was taken off the ventilator, writes Reuters news agency. The kidney was attached to her blood vessels and kept outside her body so the researchers could see what was happening to it.
According to the study leader, the test results of the transplanted pig organ looked “pretty normal” and the kidney made the amount of urine you would expect from a transplanted human kidney. The experiment was ended after 54 hours by switching off the ventilator, after which the woman died.
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