By Moboluwade Tobiloba
The surgeons of NYU Langone health in New York City have successfully completed a pig kidney transplant into a human without triggering immediate rejection by the recipient’s immune system.
This is a major advance that could eventually help reduce a dire shortage of human organs for transplant.
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.
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.
For three days, the new kidney was attached to her blood vessels and maintained outside her body, giving researchers access to it.
According to transplant surgeon, Doctor Robert Montgomery, who led the study the test results of the transplanted kidney’s function “looked pretty normal”.
The kidney made “the amount of urine that you would expect” from a transplanted human kidney, he said, and there was no evidence of the vigorous, early rejection seen when unmodified pig kidneys are transplanted into non-human primates.
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.
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, who himself is a heart transplant recipient.
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 probably be patients with low odds of receiving a human kidney and a poor prognosis on dialysis.
“For a lot of those people, the mortality rate is as high as it is for some cancers, and we don’t think twice about using new drugs and doing new trials (in cancer patients) when it might give them a couple of months more of life,” Montgomery said.
