Surgeons transplanted a pig's kidney into a human without the recipient's immune system rejecting the transplant, a major advance that could eventually lead to alleviating a severe shortage of transplant-ready human organs.
The operation took place at NYU Langone Health University in New York, where the kidney was taken from a pig after making a change to its genes so that its tissues no longer contain the molecule that helps to polarize the recipient’s immune system, and therefore it was not rejected by the recipient.
The patient for whom the kidney was transplanted was suffering from brain death and had impaired kidney functions. After obtaining approval from her family to conduct the experiment, she was transferred from the recovery room to the operating room.
The researchers attached the kidney to its blood vessels and kept it outside the body for three days.
After performing the kidney functions of the patient, it was found to be normal and creatinine returned to its normal level, in addition to that, the kidney produced the expected amount of urine, compared to a transplanted human kidney.
Also, there was no early rejection of the kidney, as happened to previous pig kidneys that were transplanted without modifying their genes.
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