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A pig’s kidney has been successfully transplanted into a human. A world first produced by American scientists.
In the United States, a pig kidney was transplanted into a brain-dead human patient. This world first was produced by the team at NYU Langone Hospital in New York. For almost two days, the patient’s body and the pig kidney functioned perfectly together. “During the 54 hours we conducted the study, the kidney performed perfectly, just as one would expect from a kidney from a human donor.“, confirmed Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the transplant institute at NYU Langone Hospital.
This transplant represents hope for the 90,000 patients awaiting kidney transplants in the United States. According to some researchers, animal-to-human transplantation could become a common operation. But so that the organ is not rejected by the human body, it is genetically modified. Many ethical questions arise alors, the main being: do we accept to transplant an animal organ on a human? “We need to ask ourselves tough questions about what it means to voluntarily develop organs in pigs“, advance Karen Maschke, researcher at the Hasting Center.