NYU surgeons say transplant of pig kidney to human marks advance

A genetically altered pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead patient has continued to function for 32 days, an advance toward the possible use of animal organs in humans, surgeons at NYU Langone Health said Wednesday.

The kidney was not rejected in the minutes after it was transplanted – a problem in xenotransplantation, the transplanting of organs from a different species. It began producing urine and took over the functions of a human kidney such as filtering toxins, the physicians said at a news conference.

The specially bred pig from which the kidney was taken required just one genetic alteration to remove a protein that human immune systems attack shortly after surgery. Surgeons also implanted the pig’s thymus gland, which helps train the immune system, by sewing it under the outer layer of the kidney, and used immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection later on.

Managing a brain-dead patient, who continues to have a heart beat and breathes with the aid of a ventilator, for an extended period of time also requires extensive efforts by critical care personnel. But the work has revealed information about longer-term use of animal organs, they said.

“We’re at a point now where we have quite a large array of information from nonhuman primates,” said Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. The question of “how translatable” that information is to humans is “what the decedent model has provided for us,” he said.

The researchers expect to follow the patient for another month.

The patient was identified as a man named “Mo,” who died of a brain tumor. His sister spoke at Wednesday morning’s news conference, saying her brother would have valued the contribution he was able to make to the science of transplantation.

More than 103,000 people are on the waiting list for transplant organs in the United States, with the vast majority seeking kidneys. In 2022, 26,000 people received kidney transplants.