Pig Kidneys Successfully Transplanted Into Brain-Dead Human Body

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Pig - Sputnik International, 1920, 20.01.2022
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The person who led the new study said that the transplant shows that a body of a brain-dead person can be used as a model for testing new medical treatments.
Surgeons in Alabama have managed to successfully transplant a pig’s kidneys into the body of a brain-dead man donated by his family, in what is a rehearsal for a surgery they eventually hope to perform on living patients, possibly this year.
News of this development come shortly after surgeons in Maryland successfully performed a first-of-its-kind organ transplant of a genetically-modified pig heart into a human patient who was deemed too sick to qualify for a human heart.
"The organ shortage is an unmitigated crisis and we've never had a real solution to it," Dr. Jayme Locke of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the person who led the new study, said as quoted by AP.
As Locke’s team reported in the American Journal of Transplantation, both kidneys survived with no signs of rejection for a little over three days, until the patient’s body was taken off life support.
While one of the kidneys was damaged during its removal from the pig and did not function properly, the other produced urine as normal; no pig viruses were transmitted to the patient during transplantation, and no pig cells were found in his bloodstream.
Surgery - Sputnik International, 1920, 09.04.2021
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Locke noted that this experiment also shows that the body of a brain-dead person can be used as a model for testing new medical treatments.
Animal-to-human transplants have previously been attempted for decades, but without success as patient’s immune systems started attacking foreign tissue almost instantly.
Now, however, technologies at scientists’ disposal allow them to edit pig genes, making the potential organ transplants more “human-like,” as the media outlet put it.
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