Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, known as Mass General, declared the world’s first successful transplantation of a pig kidney into a human.
On March 16, surgeons at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston performed the world’s first genetically modified pig kidney transplant on a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman, who was diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease. Slayman is reportedly recovering well from the four-hour operation and is expected to get discharged in a few days.
Organs From Genetically Engineered Pigs May One Day Make Dialysis Obsolete
It was the first procedure of its kind and one of the surgeons said that the procedure was a medical milestone. The breakthrough offers hope to several Americans whose kidneys have failed. Kidneys are generally in charge of removing the excess fluid from the body. Just shortly after the surgery, the transplanted kidney started to produce urine and the patient’s condition is currently getting better each day. A physician informed that Slayman would be discharged soon as he had already started to walk through the hallway of the hospital.
According to Dr. Winfrey Williams, associate chief of the neurology division at Mass General, the new source of kidneys can “solve an intractable problem in the field, especially in the wake of inadequate access of minority patients to kidney transplants. Slayman is a Blackman and therefore, the procedure may have a special significance for black people.
Meanwhile, Dr. Leonardo V. Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Mass General said that dialysis “will become obsolete” if kidneys from genetically modified animals can be transplanted in large quantities. As per a recent survey, more than 500,000 Americans are diagnosed with kidney failure and require dialysis very frequently. A study has lately discovered that end-stage kidney disease is more common among Black Americans than in white people.
Reports suggest that over 100,000 are on the waiting list to receive kidney transplants from a living or dead donor. Thousands of people die while waiting for a kidney because of an acute shortage of the organ. On average, 25,000 kidney transplantation procedures are carried out per year.
While dialysis is only a temporary solution, the gold standard treatment is an organ transplant. Xenotransplantation- the implantation of an animal organ into a living human- has been in discussion for decades as a potential solution that could elevate the availability of kidneys. However, a trial was postponed until earlier this month after many suggested that the translation might cause life-threatening complications as the human immune system is known to reject foreign tissues. Experts further pointed out that even rejection could still occur even when the donors are well-matched.
However, throughout the last few years, scientific advances including clonic and gene editing have evolved to a point where xenotransplants looked more viable as they would modify the animal genes to match the human gene to ultimately make the organs more compatible while also rejecting the chances of potential rejection.
The pig kidney that was used in the controversial surgery came from a pig that was engineered by the biotech company eGenesis. Through several processes, they removed three genes which would have caused a potential rejection. On top of that., seven other genes were injected to increase human compatibility. Since pigs carry infectious viruses, the scientists removed them to decrease the chance of ant infections.
In 2021, surgeons at NYU Langone experimented by attaching a kidney to a brain-dead man from a genetically modified pig. Later, they watched as the kidney began to function properly by making urine.