Thursday, March 28, 2024

Doctors successfully transplant pig’s kidney into human

Uba Group

BY MAYOWA SAMUEL

A landmark medical breakthrough has been achieved in the United States where a pig’s kidney has for the first time been successfully transplanted into a human.

Medical researchers say the potentially major advancement done at the New York University, Langone Health in New York City recently, was achieved without triggering immediate rejection by the recipient’s immune system which could help alleviate a dire shortage of human organs for transplant.

The researchers explain that the procedure involved the use of a pig whose genes had been altered so that its tissues no longer contained a molecule known to trigger almost immediate rejection.

They added that the recipient was a brain-dead patient with signs of kidney dysfunction whose family consented to the experiment before she was due to be taken off of life support.

The new kidney was attached to her blood vessels for three days and maintained outside her body, giving researchers access to it.

According to a transplant surgeon, Dr Robert Montgomery, who led the study, the test results of the transplanted kidney’s function “looked pretty normal.”

Montgomery added that the kidney made “the amount of urine that you would expect” 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, an indicator of poor kidney function, returned to normal after the transplant, Montgomery said.

Montgomery’s team theorised that knocking out the pig gene for a carbohydrate that triggers rejection, a sugar molecule, or glycan, called alpha-gal, would prevent the problem.

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

Medical products developed from the pigs would still require specific FDA approval 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.

The NYU kidney transplant experiment should pave the way for trials in patients with end-stage kidney failure, possibly in the next year or two, said Montgomery, himself a heart transplant recipient. Those trials might test the approach as a short-term solution for critically ill patients until a human kidney becomes available, or as a permanent graft.

In the United States, nearly 107,000 people are presently waiting for organ transplants, including more than 90,000 awaiting a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Wait times for a kidney average three to five years.

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