As the Associated Press and Reuters reported, surgeons in the United States performed the first transplantation of a pig kidney to a human without spontaneous organ rejection by the patient’s immune system.
The procedure has made great advances in medicine, which can help solve the problem of a shortage of human organs for transplantation.
The operation was performed at New York University’s Langon Health Center using a pig organ whose genes have been altered so that the tissues do not contain a molecule that causes an almost immediate rejection reaction from the human body.
Experts told Reuters that the recipient is a brain-dead patient with signs of renal dysfunction, whose family agreed to the experiment before she was removed from life support.
For three days, the kidney was connected to the patient’s circulatory system and functioned outside of her body, giving researchers access to the organ.
The kidney transplant function test results “look completely normal,” said surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery, who performed the transplant and directed the study.
The kidney produced “the expected amount of urine” as from a transplanted human organ, and there were no symptoms of early rejection, such as those seen with unmodified primate pig kidney transplants.
The patient’s creatinine levels, which were abnormal and indicated impaired renal function, returned to normal after the transplant, Montgomery said.
The study is “a significant step,” Dr. Andrew Adams of the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, who was not involved in the experiment, told The Associated Press.