Also Wednesday, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine published a similar case study of a brain dead patient who received a pig kidney that received 10 gene alterations earlier this year. The kidney was not rejected and continued to function for seven days. The results were peer reviewed and published in the journal JAMA Surgery.
The two studies provide hope of someday closing the enormous gap between the supply of and demand for kidneys by showing that pig kidneys can sustain normal human function for an extended period of time. Until Wednesday, that had not been demonstrated, according to the surgeons involved and other experts.
“This is the first time in history that anyone has been able to show a genetically modified pig kidney is able to maintain life-sustaining kidney function,” said Jayme E. Locke, lead author of the JAMA Surgery research.
On Wednesday, 103,479 people were on the waiting list for transplant organs in the United States, with 88,651 seeking kidneys, according to data kept by the United Network for Sharing. In 2022, 26,000 people received kidney transplants, according to NYU Langone.
Many people die after waiting years for a kidney and others become too sick to receive a transplant. Some never make the waiting list. About 808,000 Americans are living with end stage kidney disease, 69 percent of them on dialysis and the rest with transplants, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
The critical advances in both studies were the kidneys’ ability to concentrate urine and clear creatinine, a byproduct of muscle function that is toxic if it builds up in the human body, Locke said. She said the University of Alabama experiment could have gone on longer but was ended in deference to the decedent’s family.
Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, said researchers “are at a point now where we have quite a large array of information from nonhuman primates.” The question of “how translatable” that information is to humans is what the research is showing for the first time, he said.
In the NYU Langone transplant, the specially bred pig from which the kidney was procured 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 the brain dead man, 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, the doctors said.
The researchers expect to follow the patient for another month.
The patient was identified as 57-year-old Maurice “Mo” Miller, 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.
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