Another brain-dead man has been sustained for a month with pig kidney

In New York, doctors have successfully kept a brain dead man for over a month after removing his kidneys and replacing them with that of a pig.

After the kidney transplant, the man was kept in a ventilator and his heart was still beating while the pig kidney helped the man to produce urine.

Prior to the transplant, the pig kidney was genetically modified by deleting a gene which could trigger hyperacute rejection of the organ in human body.

Hyperacute rejection is most often mediated by antibodies from the recipient. The antibodies bind to the xenoantigens of the transplanted tissue, activating the classical complement pathway within the recipient. Within minutes or hours after the transplantation, hyperacute rejection could result in edema, interstitial hemorrhage, thrombosis and necrosis of the transplanted tissue/organ.

Over the years, experiments with genetically modified pig tissues seem to be the answer to overcoming the immune barriers to xenotransplantation. Some of the clinical applications of pig tissues in human surgery include, the use of pig cardiac valve for plastic surgery, pig dermis for extensive burns, small intestinal submucosa for bladder repairs. For instance, pig’s neuron after CTLA4-Ig modification lived for over 500 days after xenotransplantation.

The procedure which was performed by a team of surgeons on 24 July, 2023 at NYU Langone Transplant Institute is regarded as a huge success and is the longest time an animal’s organ has remained functional inside a human.

Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute believes that now that the experiment has proven that a pig’s kidney can function successfully in a brain-dead person, it could lead to approval by FDA to carry out clinical trials in living people.

The new finding shows that the pig kidneys could filter and clear creatinine in the adult human recipient., paving for a future possibility of having genetically modified pig kidneys as an alternative for patients requiring kidney transplantation.

Now that the transplant of genetically modified pig kidneys have successfully kept a brain-dead patients for over a month, scientists expect that FDA approval which is being sought, will be received soon to enable them conduct a first clinical trial in live patients.