A pig’s kidney functioned normally for two months in a brain-dead man, in an experiment that ended this Wednesday with a record and that gives hope for this type of transplant.
Dozens of doctors and nurses lined the hospital hallway in honor of the work done, which ended when surgeons from NYU Langone Medical Center in New York removed the pig’s kidney and returned Maurice’s donated body. Mo’ Miller to his family for cremation.
It was the longest period in which a genetically modified pig kidney functioned in a now deceased human.
By pushing the boundaries of research into the dead, scientists have collected crucial data that they plan to share with the US health regulator (FDA) in the hope of eventually testing pig kidneys on 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 the next attempts, he added.
Montgomery, who has undergone 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 in need of a kidney, and thousands will die while they wait.
So-called xenotransplantation attempts failed for decades because the human immune system immediately destroyed foreign animal tissue.
New in this case was experimenting with genetically modified pigs so that their organs become more similar to those of humans.
Some brief experiments on cadavers prevented an immediate immune attack, but could not compensate for a more general form of rejection, which can take up to a month.
The transplant took place on July 14 in a 57-year-old man, Maurice Miller, who became brain dead and placed on life support after his family agreed to donate his body for scientific research.
Doctors replaced his kidneys with the kidney of a genetically modified pig and also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland with immune functions, whose role in the ongoing experiment remains to be analyzed.
The kidney functioned without any signs of problems for the first month, but after that the doctors measured a slight decrease in the amount of urine produced.
A biopsy confirmed a subtle sign that rejection was starting, allowing doctors to find out if the disease was treatable.
Kidney performance has been restored thanks to a change in the standard immunosuppressive medications that patients are currently taking.
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 xenotransplantation.
Experiments on the dead cannot predict that organs will function the same way in the living, cautioned Karen Maschke, a Hastings Center researcher who helps develop ethical and policy recommendations for clinical trials of xenotransplantation, but they can provide other valuable information.
Source: DN
