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Scientists have been working on the possibility of animal-to-human transplants — or xenotransplantation – for decades now, with genetically modified pigs having been considered a source for materials like heart valves and skin grafts for human patients.
In a first, a pig’s kidney has been successfully transplanted into a human at the NYU Langone Health medical centre in New York City. This groundbreaking transplantation could eventually overcome the shortage of human organs for transplant, as per doctors.
A pig with artificially altered genes was used so that its tissues no longer had a sugar molecule, alpha-gal, which is known to trigger almost immediate rejection, as reported by Reuters.
The surgeons revealed that the recipient of this kidney was a brain-dead patient with symptoms of kidney dysfunction. The family of the patient had consented to the experiment before she was scheduled to be taken off life support.
“Test results of the transplanted kidney’s function looked pretty normal. The kidney made the amount of urine that you would expect from a transplanted human kidney and there was no evidence of the vigorous, early rejection seen when unmodified pig kidneys are transplanted into non-human primates”, said the lead transplant surgeon Dr Robert Montgomery who performed the surgery last month.