Surgeons at New York University’s largest academic medical center, Langone Health, successfully transplanted a kidney from a genetically modified pig to a patient.
The kidney attached to the outside of the patient’s body was functioning normally, but the experiment itself was short-lived. Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the transplant team, said that since the patient was in a state of brain death, the kidney was monitored for only 54 hours. As soon as the graft was attached to the patient’s circulatory system, the kidney almost immediately started working and began to produce urine and creatinine present in the urine, Montgomery added. And this is very important, the surgeon emphasized, since many kidneys taken from deceased people do not start working immediately, but only after a few days or even weeks.
More than 100,000 Americans are on the organ transplant waiting list, and every 9 out of 10 are in need of a kidney transplant, which makes this experiment particularly important.
Genetic modification was necessary because pig cells contain a sugar — alpha-linked galactose — which causes immediate rejection of the transplanted kidney, so the sugar was genetically engineered to be transplanted into humans.
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