with the successful transplant of a pig kidney into a human, a horizon opens up for biotechnology firms

This is a world first. This week, a team of Boston doctors announced the successful transplant of a genetically modified pig kidney into a human. This step raises a lot of hope and strengthens research around genome modifications.

The patient is a 62-year-old man and is doing well. In August 2023, uA team of American researchers succeeded in transplanting a pig’s kidney into a brain-dead human, without the recipient’s body rejecting the organ. This time it is about the first transplant of a pig kidney into a conscious patient. A team of Boston doctors announced the success of the operation on Thursday March 21, 2024.

The patient’s immune system does not appear to reject the transplant. With stable blood pressure, Richard Slayman could even be released from Massachusetts General Hospital fairly quickly and return home to Weymouth, a town south of Boston. He has suffered from kidney failure for a long time. Suffering from hypertension and type 2 diabetes, he underwent seven years of dialysis before a kidney transplant in 2018. But the organ ended up failing last year and since then, Richard Slayman has had to go through the ordeal again and again. difficult to dialysis. He agreed to receive this particular transplant, of course being informed of the risks. “I saw it as a way to help myself but also to give hope to the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive”, he said in a press release. The operation took place last week and the kidney is already producing urine.

Some 69 genes modified in the donor pig

The FDA, the American drug agency, authorized the intervention via a so-called “compassionate” program for patients in a desperate state. Surgeons worked for four hours to attach this pig kidney to the urethra. It’s a kidney about the same size as a human’s, but it’s genetically modified. It comes from a pig raised by a Massachusetts company called eGenesis. There are a total of 69 genes modified to increase the chances of compatibility as much as possible: ten genes modified to limit the risk of rejection and the rest to try to avoid infection linked to a virus. In 2022, a man who received the first genetically modified pig heart died quickly after the operation, possibly due to a virus.

Although the procedure lasted only four hours, its success was the result of five years of work at the hospital and at eGenesis. But it is also, says one of the surgeons, “the culmination of the efforts of thousands of scientists over several decades”.

An important step for medicine

This achievement is important to the doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital. Transplants of this kind had already been tested on monkeys or brain-dead humans. With this success on a conscious person like Richard Slayman, dialysis, which concerns hundreds of thousands of Americans in the country, will perhaps one day become obsolete.

The potential of “genome editing”, the manipulation of the genome, raises a lot of hope at the same time as it fuels the ambitions of biotechnology firms, such as eGenesis. In the United States alone, more than 100,000 patients are waiting for a transplant, and 17 people a day die because they don’t receive one on time. On the other hand, there remains the major concern of seeing viruses which could pass from animals to humans. And from an ethical point of view, the question also arises of animals that are raised solely to provide organs for human beings.