△ Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States (Image Source: Reuters)
Massachusetts General Hospital announced on the 21st that medical experts at the hospital have successfully performed a groundbreaking transplant surgery on a male American patient with end-stage kidney disease, implanting a genetically edited pig kidney into his body. This marks a global first. The patient, post-surgery, is recovering well and is expected to be discharged soon.
According to reports, experts from the hospital's transplant center conducted the four-hour procedure on the 16th. The recipient of the pig kidney transplant is Richard Sleeman, a 62-year-old man. Sleeman has been battling type 2 diabetes and hypertension for years, requiring long-term dialysis. He underwent a kidney transplant at the hospital in December 2018 but experienced signs of kidney failure a few years later, leading to a return to dialysis in May 2023. Subsequently, Sleeman encountered complications related to vascular access, prompting doctors to suggest a pig kidney transplant. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved this transplant surgery under the "compassionate use" rule.
The hospital stated that the pig kidney used in this transplant surgery underwent 69 genetic edits, including "knocking out" genes that could trigger human rejection reactions and adding some human genes to improve compatibility between animal organs and the human body. Additionally, the research team deactivated retroviral genes in the pigs to prevent viruses from affecting the transplant recipient. Medical experts at the hospital expressed hope that this transplantation approach could bring hope to millions of kidney failure patients worldwide.
According to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, a U.S. nonprofit organization, there are over 100,000 people in the United States awaiting organ transplants, with an average of 17 people dying each day while waiting for organs. To address the shortage of human organ donors, researchers have long been committed to studying xenotransplantation. Pigs, due to their organ tissue structure, physiological function, and size similarity to human organs, are considered one of the best donor animals for xenotransplantation. However, xenotransplantation still faces many challenges and risks that need to be overcome through scientific research and clinical trials.
Previously, the United States had conducted two cases of live human-pig heart transplant surgeries, but both patients died within months after the surgeries. In July of last year, a team at NYU Langone Health in the United States performed a pig kidney transplant surgery on a 57-year-old man who had been declared brain dead.
