Boston man gets genetically modified pig’s kidney in world’s first such transplant

The 62-yr-old with end-stage kidney disease was operated on at Massachusetts General Hospital. Previous animal organ transplants have been done outside human body or in brain-dead humans.

Doctors transplant the pig kidney in the 62-year-old patient | Massachusetts General Hospital

Bengaluru: American surgeons have successfully transplanted a kidney fully from a genetically modified pig into a living person in Boston for the first time. The 62-year-old man, who was the recipient of the organ, was suffering from end-stage kidney disease. Post-surgery, he is recovering well.

The procedure is the latest in a series of experimental xenotransplantations — transplantation of animal organs into humans — to address chronic and acute organ shortages. But, previous transplants were done outside the body or in brain-dead people. This is the first case of a successful animal organ transplant in a living and conscious person, and is working as expected.

The pig had been genetically edited so that its organs were compatible with human bodies and less likely to be rejected.

“Our hope is this transplant approach will offer a lifeline to millions of patients, who are suffering from kidney failure, worldwide,” said Dr Tatsuo Kawai, director for clinical transplant tolerance at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in a statement released by the hospital.

The patient, Richard Slayman, was operated on on 16 March. In 2018, he was operated on after seven years of dialysis at the same hospital but the transplant had failed last year and he had to go back on dialysis.

The hospital statement quoted Slayman as saying that he saw this experimental procedure as not only a help to him but for also providing “hope for thousands of people who need a transplant to survive”.

The genetically modified pig was grown at eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At least 10 of its genes were modified, which included new additions of human genes, to make its organs compatible with human bodies and to prevent the transfer of any diseases. The process involved inactivating viruses, which had the potential to spread to humans.

eGenesis has previously performed successful animal experiments, where it transplanted pig kidneys into monkeys, which remained alive for over two years.

According to Massachusetts General Hospital, Slayman continues to be on anti-rejection drugs, and the future of his new functioning kidney remains unknown, but he is expected to be discharged this weekend.

Animal organs have been in the running for solving human organ shortage for decades now, and surgeons have been experimenting with transplanting pig organs for specifically a little more than a century.

But xenotransplantation research is now progressing rapidly due to the development of gene editing technologies like CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), which have helped animal organs become compatible with human bodies.

In 2021, New York surgeons had transplanted a genetically modified pig’s kidney into a brain-dead patient. Later the same year, American researchers in Alabama transplanted kidneys outside of a dead patient and recorded the kidneys successfully producing urine for 74 hours. In 2022, surgeons in Maryland transplanted a pig heart into a man with terminal heart disease, but he died of an infection from the pig organ two months later.

Pigs are preferred for xenotransplantation experiments and procedures because they grow fast and their internal organs reach adult human organ size by the age of six months.

(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)