Surgeons at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital said that a 62-year-old man with end-stage renal illness had received a successful kidney transplant from a transgenic pig.
Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said on Thursday that Richard Slayman made history last Saturday when he became the first living person to receive a mutated kidney from a pig.
Although pig hearts have been given to people in the past, Mr. Slayman is the first person to be diagnosed with a pig kidney condition, which gives promise for achieving health equity.
The hospital said that the four-hour procedure on March 16 represents a major step forward in giving patients access to more readily available organs.
The 62-year-old Slayman underwent a four-hour surgery on Saturday to get the pig kidney, according to his nephrologist, Dr. Winfred Williams, who is the associate chief of Mass General's nephrology section.
Five days ago, Mr. Slayman underwent surgery. As long as no problems arise, Williams said that although he is currently resting at Mass General and there are currently no indications that the kidney is being rejected by his body's immune system., his doctors intend to send him home this weekend.
The development of the implanted organ was referred to as "a mini-Manhattan project" by one Massachusetts general surgeon.
Despite the fact that pig and human kidneys are comparable in size, scientists had to alter the pig's genetic coding 69 times, deleting certain genes and adding others in order to lower the possibility that the patient's immune system would reject the transplanted organ.
Tens of thousands of people waiting for organ transplants in the United States and countless others around the world may have hope in the wake of the first successful pig kidney transplant in a living patient, a significant development in the field of "xenotransplantation," or animal-to-human transplantation.
President of Academic Medical Centers at Mass General Brigham, David F.M. Brown, emphasized in announcing the successful transplant how long patients, families, surgeons, and scientists have held out hope that a ready and safe supply of organs suitable for human transplantation could be found.
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