A pig’s kidney functioned normally for two months inside a brain-dead man, in an experiment that concluded this Wednesday with a record and that gives hope to this type of transplants.
Dozens of doctors and nurses lined the hospital hallway in honor of the work done, which came to an end when surgeons at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York removed the pig’s kidney and returned Maurice Mo’s donated body. Miller to his family for cremation.
It was the longest period in which a genetically modified pig kidney functioned inside a deceased human being.
Pushing the boundaries of research into the dead, scientists have collected critical data that they are preparing to share with the US health regulator (FDA) in hopes of testing pig kidneys in live animals.
“It’s a combination of excitement and relief,” Robert Montgomery, the transplant surgeon who led the experiment, told the Associated Press (AP).
“Two months is a long time to have a pig kidney in good condition. It gives us a lot of confidence” for future attempts, he added.
Montgomery, who received a heart transplant, sees animal-to-human transplants as crucial to alleviating the country’s organ shortage.
More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list, most need a kidney and thousands will die waiting.
So-called xenotransplants failed for decades, as the human immune system immediately destroyed the foreign animal tissue.
The novelty in this case was experimenting with genetically modified pigs so that their organs look more like those of humans.
Some brief experiments with cadavers prevented an immediate immune attack, but did not compensate for a more common form of rejection that can take a month to form.
The transplant took place on July 14 on 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 those of a genetically modified pig and also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland with immune functions whose role in the ongoing experiment will still be analyzed.
For the first month, the kidney functioned without signs of problems, but then doctors measured a slight decrease in the amount of urine produced.
A biopsy confirmed a subtle sign that rejection was starting, giving doctors a chance to find out if it was treatable.
Renal performance has recovered with a change in the standard immunosuppressive medications patients currently use.
After the experiment was completed, the researchers took 180 different tissue samples, from all major organs, lymph nodes and the digestive system, to look for signs of problems due to the xenotransplantation.
Experiments on the deceased cannot predict that organs will function the same way in the living, cautioned Karen Maschke, a Hastings Center researcher who is helping to develop ethical and policy recommendations for xenotransplantation clinical trials, but they can provide other valuable information. .
Source: TSF
