In a first in the world, a man received a pig kidney and lived. He was discharged from hospital after 2 weeks.
The transplant procedure was carried out on 16 March by Harvard Medical School (HMS) physician-scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in the USA.
The pig kidney was provided by a biotech company and was genetically edited “to make it more compatible with humans and reduce chance of infection.”
While the long term results of the transplant are not clear, he is the first man to get such a transplant and live to be discharged from hospital.
The man, Richard “Rick” Slayman, aged 62, called it one of the happiest moments of his life. Said Slayman:
“leaving the hospital today with one of the cleanest bills of health I’ve had in a long time. I want to thank anyone who has seen my story and sent well wishes, especially patients waiting for a kidney transplant. Today marks a new beginning not just for me, but for them, as well”
Slayman received the kidney in a surgery procedure that took 4 hours. He has type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, the most common causes of chronic kidney disease. Previously, Slayman received a human kidney transplant, but after 5 years, the kidney started failing, resulting in him needing dialysis.
HMS professor, Tatsuo Kawai, part of the leaders leaders in the procedure said:
“The success of this transplant is the culmination of efforts by thousands of scientists and physicians over several decades. We are privileged to have played a significant role in this milestone.
Our hope is that this transplant approach will offer a lifeline to millions of patients worldwide who are suffering from kidney failure”
Xenotransplantation
The transplantation of organs from other animals is called xenotransplantation.
It is considered a solution to a worldwide shortage of donated human organs. More than 100,000 people who could have been saved by an organ transplant die each year globally.
In 2021 US surgeons successfully given a pig’s kidney to a human but the experimental procedure was on a brain-dead man on artificial life support, with no prospect of recovering.
In 2022, on 7 January, a 57 year man called David Bennett made history as the first person to receive a genetically modified pig’s heart. He died 2 months later on March 8.
In 2023, on 20 September, Lawrence Faucette became the second man to get genetically-modified pig heart transplant. He died nearly 6 weeks later on 30 October.
In 1962, the first person to receive a human heart transplant, on Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town, died after 18 days.
“Still much left to do”
Commenting on the recent pig kidney transplant, David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a non-profit organisation which runs a national transplant system with the US federal government, said:
Although much work remains to be done, this is a major symbolic event for the entire transplant community that represents a real possibility of xenotransplantation, one day benefitting a large number of patients.
There is a risk of rejection for all organ transplants
The recent xenotransplants have shown that scientists and researchers have been able to overcome the immediate rejection risk with genetically modified porcine organs.
But there is still much left to do before it could become widely available, such as clinical trials that replicate this in a large number of patients and the study of long-term outcomes.
Source: Al Jazeera, Harvard Medical School, National Library of Medicine