In a world first, doctors in Boston have performed a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig into a human.
The kidney was taken from the pig and transferred to a 62-year-old man who was living with end-stage kidney disease.
The miraculous procedure took place on 16 March at Massachusetts General Hospital by surgeons and took four hours to complete, the hospital announced on Thursday.
This procedure is a major turning point for the medical world after it has proven a milestone in the pursuit of making organs more readily available to patients.
After this successful attempt, the news could bring hope to more than 100,00 people in the United States who are on the waiting list for an organ to become available for transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Around 17 people die each day while they wait for an organ.
The man who has now received the first transplant with the pig kidney, which had 69 genomic edits, has said he hopes his procedure will “provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive”.
Richard Slayman, the recipient of this groundbreaking surgery who lives in Weymouth, Massachusetts, weighed up the pros and cons of getting a pig kidney transplant with the team at the transplant centre.
Mr Slayman said that his kidney started to fail in 2023 and said he had full trust in the team at the Massachusetts hospital to “meet my goals of not just improving my quality of life but extending it”.
The hospital said that the patient is recovering well and should be discharged soon.
“The real hero today is the patient, Mr Slayman,” said Joren C Madsen, the director of the MGH Transplant Center.
“As the success of this pioneering surgery, once deemed unimaginable, would not have been possible without his courage and willingness to embark on a journey into uncharted medical territory.”
Mass General Brigham, an integrated health care system, has an illustrious history in the field of organ transplantation, being innovators in the world’s first successful organ transplant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1954 – the organ in question was also a kidney.
Other achievements on their roster also include the nation’s first-ever penile transplant performed at MGH in 2016.
“Nearly seven decades after the first successful kidney transplant, our clinicians have once again demonstrated our commitment to provide innovative treatments and help ease the burden of disease for our patients and others around the world,” Anne Klibanski, the president and CEO of Mass General Brigham elated.
The pig kidney, provided by eGenesis, a Massachusetts biotechnology company, was genetically edited with 69 modifications using a technology called CRISPR-Cas9.
The technology removed harmful pig genes and replaced them with specific human genes, to get it compatible with the human body.
The procedure has the potential to be a key landmark event in the field of xenotransplantation, or animal-to-human transplantation, and has become a beacon of hope for those living with kidney disease.
The kidney is the most common organ needed for people who require a transplant, according to Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and end-stage kidney disease rates are estimated to increase 29-68 per cent in the United States by 2030.
As for Mr Slayman, the patient in this pioneering procedure, he has also been living with the same condition.
Mr Slayman has been living with Type 2 diabetes and hypertension for many years and has had a kidney transplant before, receiving the transplant from a deceased human donor in 2018.
However, his transplanted kidney started to show signs of failure around five years later and Mr Slayman had to resume dialysis in 2023, experiencing complications and had to visit the hospital every fortnight for declotting and surgical revisions, which had a knock-on effect on his quality of life.
Many of the doctors at the hospital are hopeful that the advances in xenotransplantation can be a solution to the crisis that revolves around the lack of organs for patients who desperately need them to survive.
Despite the success of the transplant, which could provide a potential solution to the demand for organs, the xenotransplantation field is still emerging.
There have been two pig-to-human heart transplants in the United States, but in both cases, the patients died after only living up to a few months after the procedure.
Mr Slayman’s procedure was also performed under the FDA’s compassionate use programme, which allows patients with serious, life-threatening illnesses or conditions to gain access to experimental treatments.
However, the experts in Massachusetts are celebrating this advanced transplant as a “major milestone” that could hopefully improve the lives of future patients.
“I am firmly convinced that xenotransplantation represents a promising solution to the organ shortage crisis,” said Leonardo Riella, the medical director who led the team of doctors in the successful transplantation.