Surgeons in the United States have performed their first pig to human kidney plant.
Gatekeepers News reports that the surgeons in what appears to be a medical breakthrough, successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a human patient and found that it worked perfectly.
Scientists said this scientific breakthrough may one day yield a vast supply of organs for severely ill patients.
According to the New York Times, the 54-hour surgery was performed on a brain-dead patient at NYU Langone Health. However, the research has not yet been peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal.
The Director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, Dr. Robert Montgomery, who performed the procedure in September said the transplanted kidney was obtained from a pig genetically engineered to grow an organ unlikely to be rejected by the human body.
In a close approximation of an actual transplant procedure, the kidney was attached to a brain-dead patient who was on a ventilator.
Montgomery said the kidney which was attached to blood vessels in the upper leg outside the abdomen, started functioning normally, making urine and the waste product creatinine almost immediately.
According to experts, the organ was not implanted in the body, problems with so-called xenotransplants from animals like primates and pigs but it usually occurs at the interface of the human blood supply and the organ, where human blood flows through pig vessels.
Dr. Montgomery added that the fact that the organ functioned outside the body is a strong indication that it will work in the body.
“It was better than I think we even expected,” he said. “It just looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor. A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start. This worked immediately.”
Montgomery while explaining how the surgery was performed said, the kidney used in the new procedure was obtained by knocking out a pig gene that encodes a sugar molecule that elicits an aggressive human rejection response.
Revivicor genetically engineered the pig while it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a source for human therapeutics.
The team of researchers also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland that is involved in the immune system, to ward off immune reactions to the kidney.
The surgeons covered it with a protective shield after attaching the kidney to blood vessels in the upper leg, so they could observe it and take tissue samples over the 54-hour study period.
Dr. Montgomery and his colleagues found the urine and creatinine levels were normal and no signs of rejection were detected during more than two days of observation.
According to Dr. Montgomery, “There didn’t seem to be any kind of incompatibility between the pig kidney and the human that would make it not work. There wasn’t an immediate rejection of the kidney.”
Health experts while reacting to this development said there are many questions to be answered about the long-term consequences of the transplant.
A professor of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Dorry Segev, who was not involved in the research, “We need to know more about the longevity of the organ.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Segev admitted this to be a huge breakthrough.
