A pig kidney continues to function 32 days after being transplanted into a brain-dead human, a record period that could contribute to solving the organ donation shortage, the Center for Responsible Medicine said today.
The NYU Langone Center for Medicine in New York emphasized in a statement that 32 days was “the longest period of time for a genetically modified pig kidney to function in a human” and confirmed its intention to pursue further testing. A month.
Maurice Miller, a 57-year-old man who underwent a transplant on July 14, was brain dead and placed on life support after his family agreed to donate his body for scientific research.
Doctors replaced their kidney with a genetically modified pig’s kidney so that the organ would not be immediately rejected by the human body, and they also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland with immune functions. Need to analyze..
Robert Montgomery, director of the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone, said biopsies and kidney tests showed no “signs of rejection” after 32 days, and that the genetically modified pig kidney “replaces all the major functions performed by the human kidney.” ”.
Maurice Miller’s sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, admitted donating the body was a “very difficult decision” but felt she would have been “proud to have helped so many lives” by his death.
Animal-human organ transplants aim to solve the shortage of organ donors, with the US the country with tens of thousands of patients on transplant waiting lists.
A team from the University of Maryland in the US, on 07 January 2022, performed the world’s first pig kidney transplant into a human at a New York institution in September 2021, ahead of the first pig heart transplant into a human. , then aged 57, died on March 9, 2022.
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