A genetically altered pig kidney has functioned for 32 days in a man declared neurologically dead. His heart is still beating, and he is breathing with the aid of a respirator.
The kidney was not rejected in the minutes after it was transplanted — a problem in xenotransplantation, the transplanting of organs from a different species. It began producing urine and took over the functions of a human kidney such as filtering toxins, the physicians said at a news conference.
The specially bred pig from which the kidney was taken required just one genetic alteration to remove a protein that human immune systems attack shortly after surgery. Surgeons also implanted the pig’s thymus gland, which helps train the immune system, by sewing it under the outer layer of the kidney, and used immunosuppressive drugs, to prevent rejection later on.
“We’re at a point now where we have quite a large array of information from nonhuman primates,” said Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. The question of “how translatable” that information is to humans is “what the decedent model has provided for us,” he said.The patient was identified as a man named “Mo,” who died of a brain tumor.
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