‘Potential miracle’: pig kidney works in human patient
- Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work
- Potentially a major advance that could help alleviate shortages of human organs for transplant
A US medical team has succeeded in temporarily attaching a pig’s kidney to a person, a transplant breakthrough hailed as a “potential miracle” by the surgeon who led the procedure.
The surgery, carried out on September 25, involved a genetically modified donor animal and a brain-dead patient on a ventilator whose family had given permission for the two-day experiment, for the sake of advancing science.
“It did what it’s supposed to do, which is remove waste and make urine,” Robert Montgomery, director of the transplant institute at New York University (NYU) Langone, said in an interview.
Critically, the organ was able to reduce the level of the molecule creatinine, a key indicator of kidney health that was elevated in the patient prior to the transplant.
Montgomery carried out the surgery with several colleagues over the course of around two hours.
They joined the kidney to blood vessels on the top of one of the patient’s legs, so that they could observe it and take biopsy samples.