Doctors in Alabama said that they had successfully transplanted a pair of pig kidneys into the body of a brain-dead person, potentially paving the way for clinical trials of animal-to-human transplants for patients in desperate need of kidneys and other organs.
According to a report from the WSJ, The first-of-its-kind surgery was performed in late September at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and described in a paper published Thursday in the American Journal of Transplantation.
The genetically engineered kidneys weren’t immediately rejected by the recipient’s body and showed limited function for the duration of the multiday experiment, the doctors said. “The organ shortage is in fact an unmitigated crisis and we’ve never had a real solution to it,” said Dr. Jayme Locke of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who led the newest study and aims to begin a clinical trial of pig kidney transplants.
CBS7 News, Similar experiments have made headlines in recent months as research into animal-to-human transplants heats up. Twice this fall, surgeons at New York University temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to blood vessels outside the body of a deceased recipient to watch them work.
And earlier this month, surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center gave a dying man a heart from a gene-edited pig that so far is keeping him alive. But scientists still needed to learn more about how to test such transplants without risking a patient’s life.
With the help of a family who donated a loved one’s body for science, Locke mimicked the way human organ transplants are done — from removing the pig “donor” kidneys to sewing them inside the deceased man’s abdomen. For a little over three days, until the man’s body was removed from life support, the pair of pig kidneys survived with no sign of immediate rejection, her team reported Thursday in the American Journal of Transplantation.
