“A 53-year-old Alabama woman with kidney failure who waited eight years for an organ transplant has received a kidney harvested from a genetically modified pig” at NYU Langone Health, reports the New York Times:
The patient, Towana Looney, went into surgery just before Thanksgiving. She was in better health than others who have received porcine organs to date and left the hospital 11 days after the procedure. But Ms. Looney returned on Friday for a series of intravenous infusion treatments. Even before the transplant, she had high levels of antibodies that made it difficult to find a compatible human donor kidney. The case will be closely watched by the transplant community, as success could speed initiation of a clinical trial, bringing pig transplants closer to reality and helping to solve the organ-supply shortage.
Since the transplant, Ms. Looney has been off dialysis, doctors said, and her blood pressure, stubbornly high for decades despite a cocktail of medications, is now controlled. The kidney she received started making urine even before she woke from surgery, and blood tests show it is clearing creatinine, a waste product, from her body.
In another scientific advance that could help people who need organ transplants, a patient last year was given a 3D-printed windpipe, using an organ shaped by a 3D-printer: “The patient’s new organ is built with cartilage and mucosal lining (the moist lining that you get in some of your organs and body cavities like your lungs and nose). The scientists obtained nasal stem cells and cartilage cells from other patients to create these elements – cells which were discarded during a procedure to treat nasal congestion and from a nasal septum surgery. But the 3D-printed windpipe also contains polycaprolactone (PCL) for structural support, as well as bio-ink. Rather than the ink you might see in your printer at home, bio-ink carries the living cells needed to create living tissue in 3D-bioprinting.”
Scientists are also working on turning spleens into functioning livers for people with liver damage.
A gene-edited kidney transplant allowed a monkey to survive for two years, a scientific advance that could be used in the future to help increase the supply of kidneys for people who currently can’t get one. Earlier, the New York Post wrote about “How pigs will save thousands of human lives through organ transplants.” In 2022, David Bennett, a 57-year-old man with end-stage heart disease, received a genetically modified pig heart at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The cost of a heart transplant in the US was around $1.66 million in 2022, while pig transplants cost less, about $500,000. Even without genetic modifications, a pig kidney worked for a month in a brain-dead man it was transplanted into.
