Surgeons in Boston, led by Brazilian physician Dr. Leonardo V. Riella, Medical Director of Kidney Transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital, transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a 62-year-old sick man, in the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the discovery will offer hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose kidneys do not function.
So far, the signs are promising.
The new kidney began producing urine shortly after the surgery last weekend, and the patient’s condition continues to improve, according to doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital, known as Mass General. He is already walking the hospital corridors and may be discharged soon.
If genetically modified animal kidneys can be transplanted on a large scale, dialysis “will become obsolete,” Dr. Riella told The New York Times.
More than 550,000 Americans have kidney failure and require dialysis, a procedure that filters toxins from the blood. Over 100,000 are on the waiting list to receive a kidney transplant from a living or deceased human donor. End-stage kidney disease is three times more common among Black Americans than among whites.
Additionally, tens of millions of Americans have chronic kidney disease, which can lead to organ failure.
While dialysis keeps people alive, the “gold standard” treatment is organ transplantation. Thousands of patients die each year while waiting for a kidney because there is an acute shortage of organs. Only 25,000 kidney transplants are performed each year.
Xenotransplantation – the implantation of an animal organ into a human – has been proposed for decades as a potential solution that could make kidneys much more widely available. But the human immune system rejects foreign tissues, causing potentially fatal complications, and experts note that long-term rejection can occur even when donors are well-matched.
In recent years, scientific advances, including genetic editing and cloning, have brought xenotransplantation closer to reality, making it possible to modify animal genes to make the organs more compatible and less likely to be rejected by the human immune system.
The kidney came from a pig developed by the biotechnology company eGenesis, which removed three genes involved in the potential rejection of the organ. Additionally, seven human genes were inserted to increase human compatibility. Pigs carry retroviruses that can infect humans, and the company also inactivated the pathogens.
However, the surgery has already faced criticism. Xenotransplantation raises the prospect of even greater exploitation of animals and could introduce new pathogens into human populations, said Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, to The New York Times.
Source: The New York Times