US surgeons successfully transplant a pig kidney into a human

For the first time, a pig kidney has been transplanted into a human without triggering immediate rejection of the recipient’s immune system, a potentially important advance that could eventually help alleviate a severe shortage of human organs for transplantation.

The procedure performed at NYU Langone Health in New York City involved so that their tissues no longer contained a molecule known to trigger almost immediate rejection.

The recipient was a brain-dead patient with signs of kidney dysfunction whose family consented to the experiment before her life support was removed, the researchers said.

For three days, the new kidney attached itself to his blood vessels and s, allowing the researchers to access it.

Results of transplanted kidney function tests “They seemed quite normal”, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, a transplant surgeon, who led the study.

The kidney produced “The amount of urine you would expect” from a transplanted human kidney, he said, and that is seen when unmodified pig kidneys are transplanted into non-human primates.

The recipient’s abnormal creatinine level, an indicator of poor kidney function, returned to normal after transplantation, Montgomery said.

In the United States, about 107,000 people are currently awaiting organ transplants, including more than 90,000 awaiting a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Waiting times for a kidney

Researchers have been working for decades on the possibility of using animal organs for transplants, but have been hampered on how to prevent immediate rejection by the human body.

Montgomery’s team theorized that for a carbohydrate that triggers rejection, a sugar or glucan molecule, called alpha-gal, would avoid the problem.

The genetically altered pig, named GalSafe, was developed by the Revivicor unit of United Therapeutics. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in December 2020, for use as a food for people with a meat allergy and as a potential source of human therapeutics.

Medical products developed from pigs are still from the FDA before being used in humans, the agency said.

Other researchers are considering whether GalSafe pigs can be sources of everything from heart valves to skin grafts for human patients.

NYU’s kidney transplant experiment should pave the way for him, possibly in the next year or two, said Montgomery, who also received a heart transplant. Those trials could test the approach as a short-term solution for critically ill patients until a human kidney is available, or as a permanent graft.

The current experiment involved a single transplant and the kidney was left in place for only three days, so any future trials are likely to uncover new barriers that will need to be overcome, Montgomery said. Participants would likely be patients unlikely to receive a human kidney and a poor prognosis on dialysis.

“For many of those people, the death rate is as high as for some cancers, and we don’t think twice about using new drugs and doing new trials (in cancer patients) when “, dijo Montgomery.

The researchers worked with medical ethicists, legal and religious experts to examine the concept before asking a family for temporary access to a brain-dead patient, Montgomery said.

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