Transplants, pig kidney implantation tested on humans: no rejection

Step forward towards the goal of xenotransplantation. US surgeons “successfully” tested the implantation of a pig kidney on a brain-dead human patient: they connected the organ to a couple of large blood vessels and observed it for 2 days. The kidney functioned, filtering and producing urine, and there was no rejection. The researchers scored the feat in September at New York University Langone Health in New York. The kidney, assures Robert Montgomery, the expert who led the team, quoted in the online ‘Guardian’, “had an absolutely normal function”. The experiment was conducted on a brain-dead woman who was kept attached to a ventilator and whose family consented to the test. Scientists explain that transplanting a pig’s organ to a deceased person is a “significant advance” on the road to animal-to-human transplants. A ten-year research, that on xenotransplants. And pigs have been the target of several studies that aim to address the problem of organ shortage. But a sugar in their cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. To overcome this obstacle, the kidney for this experiment came from a genetically engineered animal designed to eliminate that sugar and avoid an immune system attack.