New York surgeons transplanted a pig's kidney into a brain-dead man and for over a month it's worked normally.
The latest experiment announced Wednesday by NYU Langone Health marks the longest a pig kidney has functioned in a person, albeit a deceased one -– and it’s not over. Researchers are set to track the kidney’s performance for a second month.
The possibility that pig kidneys might one day help ease a dire shortage of transplantable organs persuaded the family of the 57-year-old Maurice “Mo” Miller from upstate New York to donate his body for the experiment. The NYU experiment is one of a string of developments aimed at speeding the start of such clinical trials. Also Wednesday, the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported another important success -- a pair of pig kidneys worked normally inside another donated body for seven days.
NYU and a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham had tested pig kidney transplants in deceased recipients for just two or three days. An NYU team also had transplanted pig hearts into donated bodies for three days of intense testing. The operation took careful timing. Early that morning Drs. Adam Griesemer and Jeffrey Stern flew hundreds of miles to a facility where Virginia-based Revivicor Inc. houses genetically modified pigs — and retrieved kidneys lacking a gene that would trigger immediate destruction by the human immune system.
How long should these experiments last? Alabama's Locke said that’s not clear -– and among the ethical questions are how long a family is comfortable or whether it's adding to their grief. Because maintaining a brain-dead person on a ventilator is difficult, it’s also dependent on how stable the donated body is.
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