Doctors at New York University Hospital successfully transplanted a pig’s kidney to a person whose immune system didn’t immediately reject the organ.
This surgery is ground-breaking, and the procedure could lead to the use of animals organs in life-saving transplants.
The surgery was performed on a brain-dead patient with the kidney of a pig whose genes had explicitly been altered so that its tissues no longer contained a molecule known to trigger near-immediate rejection in the recipient.
The patient’s family consented to the experimental surgery before doctors removed the woman from life support.
Researchers monitored the kidney for three days as the organ was maintained outside the patient’s body while still attached to her blood vessels.
The doctor who led the study, Dr. Robert Montgomery, said test results from the kidney’s function “looked pretty normal,” adding that the organ produced “the amount of urine that you would expect” from a transplanted human kidney.
