WASHINGTON: A US medical team announced Thursday that it has performed the second known kidney transplant from pig to human, the first inside the body of a brain dead recipient.
The procedure, which was described in a scientific paper, comes on the heels of the successful transplant of a pig's heart earlier this month. It is hoped that advances in the field of so-called xenotransplantation, or cross-species organ donation, may one day solve the chronic shortage of organ donation.
"Today's results are a remarkable achievement for humanity and advance xenotransplants into the clinical field," said Selwyn Vickers, dean of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Heersink School of Medicine, which carried out the procedure.
The first pig kidney transplant in humans was performed by a team at New York University (NYU) Langone on September 25, 2021, and involved a brain-dead patient on a ventilator whose family allowed the proof-of-concept experiment. was given. That procedure involved attaching a kidney to the blood vessels at the top of one of the patient's legs, so that scientists could inspect it and take biopsy samples. The same team did another similar experiment on 22 November.
The newly announced surgery took place on September 30, 2021. It involved two kidneys from a genetically modified pig inside a man, 57-year-old Jim Parsons, who had
Wanted to become an organ donor but his organs were deemed unsuitable. "The transplanted kidneys filter the blood, produce urine and, importantly, are not immediately discarded," UAB said in a statement.
The kidneys remained viable until the study ended 77 hours later, and the findings were published in the peer-reviewed "American Journal of Transplantation." Furthermore, because the kidney was completely attached inside the body, the UAB team says their procedure is one step closer to becoming a clinical reality. They plan to go into human trials soon and then get regulatory approval. The donor pig had 10 major genetic modifications to make its organs suitable for human transplantation.
All of the donor pigs involved in the four known pig-to-human transplants came from a herd of Revvicor, a subsidiary of the biotech company United Therapeutics Corporation. Previous research has found such pig transplants to be suitable for non-human primates.
According to official US figures, about 107,000 Americans are waiting for an organ—90,000 of whom require a kidney. Seventeen Americans die each day waiting for an organ. Today, pig heart valves are widely used in humans, and pig skin is applied to human burn victims. Pigs make ideal donors because of their organ size, their rapid growth and large litter, and the fact that they have already been raised as a food source.