People desperate for a kidney transplant may have new hope
Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants.
Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but among the hurdles has been a sugar in pig cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. The kidney for this experiment came from a gene-edited animal, engineered to eliminate that sugar and avoid an immune system attack.
Surgeons at NYU Langone Health attached the pig kidney to a pair of large blood vessels outside the body of a braindead recipient so they could observe it for three days.
Amazingly, the kidney did what exactly it was supposed to do, filter waste and produce urine, and it didn’t trigger rejection from the human body as other experiments have shown.
From Reuters:
“In the United States, nearly 107,000 people are presently waiting for organ transplants, including more than 90,000 awaiting a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Wait times for a kidney average three-to-five years.
“Researchers have been working for decades on the possibility of using animal organs for transplants, but have been stymied over how to prevent immediate rejection by the human body.
Susan Saunders 10/21/21
