by Surgeons in Boston have successfully transplanted the kidney of a genetically modified pig into a 66-year-old man with kidney failure last month, Massachusetts General Hospital announced Friday.
It was the fourth kidney transplantation in the United States, and the first of three to be done at Mass General as part of a new clinical study sanctioned by the Food and Drug Administration. Two of the previous patients died shortly after the procedure, including someone who was critically ill before the transplant.
More than 100,000 people in the country are on waiting lists for transplantation organs, usually kidneys, but there is an acute shortage of human donor organs. Many people will die while waiting.
To help relieve the shortage, various biotech companies process the genes of pigs so that their organs are not easily rejected by the human body.
The new clinical study, which uses organs produced by the Biotech company Egenese, is one of the two studies of genetically manipulated animal organs that received green light from regulators earlier this week. The other, sponsored by United Therapeutics Corporation, starts later this year with six patients, but that number could eventually rise to 50.
The newest transplant recipient, Tim Andrews from Concord, NH, was operated on at the end of January and was good enough to be fired a week later.
“When I got out of the aerial space and went to intensive care, I was actually located between the table and my bed,” Mr Andrews said in an interview on Thursday. “I am so happy, it’s incredible.”
Mr Andrews had been in kidney dialysis for more than two years and lasted hours of treatments every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. They usually left him tired and nauseous, and he was unable to work or put a lot around the house.
He had a heart attack shortly after starting dialysis, and last August, when he started discussing the possibility of transplantation with mass general doctors, he used a wheelchair. They told him that he had to get better in shape before the operation, so he started to do and walk physiotherapy.
Just like Towana Looney, a woman from Alabama who received a kidney from a pig in November in Nyu Langone, Mr Andrews said that after the operation he felt better than he had in years.
“It’s like a new engine – suddenly I had an energy machine that flowed into me,” he said.
Even if the pig organs prove to be safe and effective, it is unclear what they would cost and whether they would be covered by the insurance. Most patients who experience kidney failure cannot work and are covered by the Medicare Public Health Plan.
The kidney that Mr Andrews received came from a pig that had undergone 69 gene operations, including 59 to inactivate retroviruses of pigs in an attempt to reduce the risk of infection to people.
Two patients who had transplants with pig kidneys last year died shortly after the procedures, including Lisa Pisano of New Jersey, who undergone her operation in New York and whose kidney was designed by United Therapeutics Corporation, and Richard Slayman from Massachusetts, who received an Egenesis , Kidney at mass general.
But Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, the main surgeon who was involved in the operations at Mass General, said that doctors constantly learned.
The aim is “to make genetically processed pig organs a viable, long -term solution for patients,” said Dr. Kawai in a statement. “Although we still have a long way to realize that, this transplant is an important next step.”
