RESEARCHERS TEST PIG-TO-HUMAN KIDNEY TRANSPLANT
Surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have transplanted genetically modified pig kidneys into a brain dead man, the university announced Thursday.
The transplantation of the organs, which functioned for more than 70 hours, marks another major step forward in the use of animal organs to replace failing ones in humans. Earlier this month, doctors at the University of Maryland transplanted a genetically altered pig’s heart into a living man with terminal heart disease.
The UAB kidney transplant took place in September, less than a week after surgeons at NYU Langone performed a similar surgery on a deceased woman.
All three surgeries reflect advances in the accelerating field of xenotransplantation — the process of implanting organs from one species into another.
In an interview Thursday,
Jayme Locke, director of UAB’s Incompatible Kidney Transplant Program, said that the advances are made possible by new technologies, including CRISPR, the geneediting technology that was recognized with a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020.
“The new tools have
changed the precision and rapidity,” Locke said. The peerreviewed research on the transplant was published Thursday in the American Journal of Transplantation.
Locke and other doctors hope the use of genetically altered animals could address the shortage of organs available for transplant.
The need is dire. More than 100,000 patients are on the national transplant waiting list. Seventeen of them die every day waiting for a donor organ. For the 37 million Americans with chronic kidney disease, the lack of organs can be a death sentence: Forty percent of wait-listed patients will be dead within five years, she said.
The pig kidneys used in the UAB study had been modified with 10 gene edits. The transplantation replicated the process of human-to-human transplantation. After transplantation the organs filtered blood and produced urine for the duration of the study — 70 hours, until it was stopped.
The use of a brain dead human allows surgeons to test a preclinical model without harming a living person, rather than relying on other primates as substitutes.