A team of doctors in the United States has claimed success in experimentally transplanting a pig's kidney into a human body. They describe it as a major achievement for medical science, and believe it could ultimately help end the shortage of organ donors.
According to a BBC report, the woman who received the pig kidney was already brain-dead. The patient was on life support and her own kidneys were failing. The doctors began the operation with her family's permission.
How the operation was done
The surgery, which lasted about two and a half hours, was carried out at NYU Langone Health medical centre at New York University. Beforehand, the doctors had altered one of the pig's genes so that the human body would not immediately reject the organ once it was transplanted.
The researchers attached the kidney to blood vessels near the upper leg, outside the patient's abdomen, and monitored it through a range of tests over three days.
Transplant surgeon Robert Montgomery, who led the research, said the new kidney began working normally immediately after the transplant. It produced "the amount of urine you would expect" from a transplanted human kidney, he said. He added that earlier, in mammals other than humans, kidneys that had not been gene-edited had also shown no signs of acute rejection in initial observation.
The doctors removed a gene in the pig's genetic make-up that produces a sugar. Then, with permission from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a pig carrying the altered gene was bred and raised. The kidney was later taken from that animal.
Not yet peer-reviewed
The US doctors' new research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in any medical journal, although they plan to do so. Experts nevertheless say it is the most advanced experiment of its kind in medical science so far.
Source: Prothom Alo. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.
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