For the first time, a pig’s kidney has been successfully transplanted into a human being at the NYU Langone Health in New York City.
The recipient was a brain-dead patient with signs of kidney dysfunction whose family consented to the experiment because she was due to be taken off life support. For three days,the new kidney was attached to her blood vessels and maintained outside her body. Reports have it that no immediate side effect or immediate rejection by the recipient’s immune system was observed.
The kidney produced the rigt amount of urine that was expected from a transplanted human kidney, and there was no evidence of the vigorous, early rejection seen when unmodified pig kidneys are transplanted into non-human primates.
The recipient’s abnormal creatinine level that is an indicator of poor kidney function returned to normal after the transplant.
Researchers have been working for decades on the possibility of using animal organs for transplants, but have been stymied over how to prevent immediate rejection by the human body.
However,the team that carried out the transplant theorized that knocking out the pig’s gene for a carbohydrate that triggers rejection of a sugar molecule, or glycan called alpha-gal, would prevent the problem.
