In a major step towards animal-human transplants, surgeons at New York University's Langone Health have transplanted a genetically-modified pig's kidney into a brain-dead man that has been functioning normally for over a month. This marks the longest time an animal organ has functioned in a human body.
The latest success comes after scientists have failed for decades to find a suitable animal organ transplant as the immune system of humans attack the foreign tissues. Scientists in the US have been working for a long time to figure out how to use animal organs to save human lives using bodies that have been donated for research.
"Is this organ really going to work like a human organ? So far it's looking like it is," Dr Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone's transplant institute, told AP. He further remarked that that the kidney of the pig is working even better than a human kidney.
During the operation, doctors Adam Griesemer and Jeffrey Stern flew hundreds of miles to a facility housing genetically-modified pigs and collected the kidneys lacking a gene. The deceased person's kidneys were removed before the procedure. The NYU team is now set to track the kidney's performance for a second month.
However, it is not yet clear how a deceased body will mimic a live patient's reactions to a pig organ, but a research can educate people about such transplants, said University of Maryland's Dr Muhammad Mohiuddin.
The brain-dead person has been identified as the 57-year-old Maurice "Mo" Miller, whose family donated his body for the experiment in hopes that pig kidneys might soon ease a shortage of transplantable organs.
"I struggled with it... I think this is what my brother would want. So I offered my brother to them. He's going to be in the medical books, and he will live on forever," said Maurice's sister Mary Miller-Duffy.
The process of animal-to-human transplants is commonly termed as xenoplantation. In this specific procedure, pigs are being genetically modified so that the organs match human bodies.
In 2022, the University of Maryland made a historic achievement by transplanting the heart of a genetically-modified pig into the body of a dying person who was reportedly out of other options. However, the organ worked for only two months before failing for unknown reasons.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now considering to allow small but rigorous studies of pig heart or kidney transplants in volunteering patients. Over 100,000 patients are on the country's transplant list and many die while waiting for them.
The NYU has previously experimented with pig kidney and heart transplants in deceased patients for a limited time. It is unclear how pig organs react to the human immune system.
(With AP inputs)
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