A pig kidney continues to function 32 days after being transplanted into a brain-dead human being, a record period that could help solve the shortage of organ donations, the responsible medical center reported Wednesday.
The NYU Langone Academic Center of Medicine, in New York, confirmed, in a statement, that the 32 days represent “the longest period of operation of a genetically modified pig’s rim in a human being” and confirmed the intention to continue the experiment for more one month.
The transplant took place on July 14 in a 57-year-old man, Maurice Miller, who was brain dead and placed on life support after his family agreed to donate his body for scientific research.
The doctors replaced his kidneys with the kidney of a genetically modified pig, so that the organ would not be immediately rejected by the human body, and they also transplanted the pig’s thymus gland, a gland with immune functions, the role of which in the ongoing experiment is not yet known. is known. to be analyzed. .
The director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, Robert Montgomery, affirmed that the kidney biopsies and tests show no “signs of rejection” after 32 days and considered that the genetically modified pig kidney “replaces all the important functions that a human kidney”. “.
Maurice Miller’s sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, acknowledged that donating the body was “a very difficult decision to make”, but considered that with her death she would have been “proud to help in the lives of many people”.
Animal-to-human organ transplants aim to address the shortage of organ donations, with the United States being a country with tens of thousands of patients on the waiting list for transplants.
The New York institution performed the world’s first transplant from a pig kidney to a human in September 2021, before a team from the University of Maryland, also in the United States, performed the first pig heart transplant on January 7, 2022, with the man, then 57 years old, passed away on March 9, 2022.
Source: TSF
