A pig's kidney has been successfully transplanted to a human sparking hopes that animals could be used to ease the massive shortage of human organ donations.
Currently people needing an organ donation need to join long queues for one to become available through somebody else’s tragedy but that could be about to change.
An operation in the US saw a pig’s kidney moved to a brain dead human on life support and now Dr Robert Montgomery, who led the operation, said the next step will be to carry it out on a person needing a transplant.
“It’s going to give us that confidence that something’s not going to go wrong immunologically in these first couple of days," Montgomery told USA Today. "We still are assuming a lot until we actually do this.”
In what may sound like the realms of science fiction, a pig had its genes altered so that its tissues would not be immediately rejected, in a procedure carried out at a New York medical centre.
Then the organ was given to a brain-dead woman, 66, still on life support, who had signs of kidney dysfunction, following consent from her family.
Over three days the new kidney was attached to her blood vessels and outside of her body to give access to researchers at the NYU Langone Health centre.
“It was such a moving experience to talk to this family,” he said. “It’s just amazing that somebody would be so thoughtful and altruistic to be open to something that is not normalized in our culture like that. … It’s pretty extraordinary.”
Test results of the transplanted kidney's function "looked pretty normal," said transplant surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the study.
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.
Importantly the recipients creatine levels, that indicate poor kidney function, returned to normal after the transplant.
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.
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.
