Doctors in Boston announced Thursday that they have transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a 62-year-old patient.
Massachusetts General Hospital said it is the first transplant of a pig kidney into a living person. Previously, pig kidneys had been transplanted into brain-dead donors. On the other hand, two men received pig hearts, but both died within a few months.
The experimental transplant was performed at the hospital in Boston on Saturday. The patient, Richard “Rick” Slayman, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, is fully recovering and is expected to be discharged shortly, doctors said Thursday.
Slayman had a kidney transplant at the hospital in 2018, but had to go back on dialysis last year when he showed signs of failure. When complications arose with dialysis, doctors suggested a pig kidney graft, he said in a statement distributed by the hospital.
“I saw it as not only a way to help myself, but to raise hope for thousands of people who require a transplant to survive,” Slayman said.
The announcement marks the latest step in xenotransplantation, the attempt to cure human patients with cells, tissues or organs from animals. For decades it did not work, as the human immune system immediately destroyed the foreign tissue. The most recent attempts have been made with pigs modified to make their organs more like humans, raising new hopes that they may one day make up for the shortage of donated organs.
More than 100,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for a transplant, mostly kidney patients, and thousands die each year before their turn comes.
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