Pig kidney has successfully taken root in the human body: it has been working for a month

Surgeons transplanted a pig's kidney into a brain-dead man, and for more than a month the organ functioned normally. This is an important step towards the operation, which the New York team hopes to eventually perform on living patients. Writes about it APNews.

Photo: IStock

Scientists across the country are rushing to learn how to use animal organs to save human lives, and bodies donated for research represent an exciting opportunity.

The latest experiment, announced by NYU Langone Health, highlights: the pig kidney functioned in a human, albeit deceased; and it's not over yet. The researchers are set to monitor kidney function for a second month.

“Will this organ really work like a human? So far, this is what it looks like,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the Langone Transplant Institute at New York University.

On the subject: A pig heart was transplanted to a man - after 2 months he died: now it turned out that the organ was infected with a virus

“It looks even better than a human kidney,” Montgomery said July 14. It was then that scientists replaced the kidneys of a deceased person with a single kidney of a genetically modified pig - and saw how it immediately began to produce urine.

The possibility that pig kidneys could one day alleviate the acute shortage of transplantable organs convinced the family of Maurice Miller of upstate New York to donate his body for the experiment. He died suddenly at the age of 57 from previously undiagnosed brain cancer, which ruled out conventional organ donation.

“I doubted it for a long time,” his sister Mary Miller-Duffy explained her decision. “But he liked to help others.” I think that’s what my brother would have wanted.”

“His name will be in the medical books and he will live forever,” she said.

Attempts at animal-to-human transplantation or xenotransplantation have been unsuccessful for decades as people's immune systems attack the foreign tissue. Now researchers are using genetically modified pigs to make their organs better match human bodies.

Last year, with special regulatory clearance, University of Maryland surgeons transplanted a gene-edited pig's heart into a dying man who had no other options. He lived for another two months, and the organ failed. The reasons for this are not fully understood, but lessons can be learned from them for future attempts.

Going forward, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering small but rigorous trials of porcine heart or kidney transplantation in volunteer patients.

The NYU experiment is one of a series of developments aimed at accelerating the start of such clinical trials. In addition, the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported another major success: a pair of pig kidneys functioned normally inside another donor body for seven days.

The kidneys don't just produce urine - they perform a wide range of functions in the body. UAB transplant surgeon Dr. Jamie Locke told JAMA Surgery magazine about laboratory tests documenting the work of genetically modified pig organs. The week-long experiment demonstrates that they can "provide life-sustaining kidney function," she said.

According to Montgomery (he is a transplant surgeon who himself has required a heart transplant), these kinds of experiments are critical to answering the remaining questions “in a setting where we don’t put anyone’s life in danger.” He, like no one else, is acutely aware of the need for new sources of organs.

Over 100 patients are on the national transplant list and thousands die every year while waiting.

Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin from Maryland does not undertake to assert how accurately the body of the deceased is able to imitate the reaction of a living patient to a pig organ. However, he noted that the study informs the public about xenotransplantation, so "people won't be shocked" when the time comes to try it on a living patient.

Previously, New York University and a team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham tested pig kidney transplants in deceased recipients for just two or three days. The NYU team also transplanted pig hearts into donor bodies during three days of intensive testing.

But how do pig organs respond to a more common human immune attack that takes about a month to form? Only longer testing can tell.

The operation itself, Montgomery said. not so different from the thousands he spent, “but somewhere in the back of your mind is the awareness of what you are doing. This could have a huge impact on the future of transplantation.”

The operation took a long time. In the early hours of the morning, Drs. Adam Grisemer and Jeffrey Stern flew hundreds of miles to the site where Revivicor Inc. from Virginia contains genetically modified pigs, and extracted kidneys that lack a gene that causes immediate destruction of the organ by the human immune system.

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As they raced back to New York University, Montgomery removed both kidneys from the donor body. One pig kidney was transplanted, the other was left for comparison after the experiment was completed.

In another trick, surgeons attached a pig's thymus to a transplanted kidney in the hope that the gland, which helps train immune cells, would increase a person's tolerance for the organ. Otherwise, the team relies on the standard immunosuppressants used by transplant patients today.

How long should these experiments continue? Locke, of Alabama, doesn't know, and there's also an ethical dimension to the question of how long relatives will be comfortable, or it will aggravate their grief. Since it is difficult to keep a brain-dead person on a ventilator, it depends on how stable the donor organ is.

In her own experiment, the donor body was stable enough that if the study didn't have to end in a week, she said, "I think we could have lasted a lot longer, and that's very encouraging."

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