A new, potential hope for a cure arrives for hundreds of thousands of patients on the waiting list to receive a transplant of organ. In fact, the first transplant of a human was carried out in the United States rene Of pig genetically modified on a living patient. It is not the first time that pig organs have been targeted, with the aim of being able to use easily available organs in the hopefully near future given the scarcity of human organs to transplant. Boston surgeons transplanted the kidney from a genetically modified pig into a 62 year old mansuffering from terminal renal disease.
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The operation
This is the first procedure of this kind: other attempts had in fact been carried out in the past but on brain-dead patients. The transplant, if successful, will therefore offer concrete hope to many sick people. According to the New York Times, the signs so far are promising: the organ began producing urine shortly after the surgery and the patient’s condition continues to improve, reports Massachusetts General Hospital. “Our hope is that this approach to transplantation offers a lifeline to millions of patients around the world suffering from kidney failure,” said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, a member of the team.
The patient
The hospital said the patient, Richard Slayman of Weymouth, Massachusetts, “is recovering well and is expected to be released soon.” Slayman, who suffers from type 2 diabetes and hypertension, received a human kidney transplant in 2018 but began having problems five years later. Slayman said he accepted the pig kidney transplant “not just as a way to help me, but as a way to give hope to the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive.” The Boston xenotransplant, comments Giuseppe Feltrin, director of the National Transplant Center (Cnt), «can open a frontier, and at the moment it is not the only one because scientific research in the field of transplants is going very fast, we have also demonstrated this in Italy with the great development of heart-stopped donation. The common horizon is to make transplant therapy truly accessible to all. What should not be forgotten is that this is a hope for the future, while today about 8 thousand patients waiting for a transplant are still linked to human donation: science will continue to do its part but today we still need to say yes to the donation”.
Xenotrapianth
24 years have passed since Thomas Starzl, the American doctor who pioneered liver transplantation, indicated xenotransplantation, or the transplantation of organs from animal to man, as the frontier for solving the problem of organ scarcity. And the ideal candidate for xenotransplantation was, Starzl stated, the genetically modified pig. The next step was the transplant of a pig heart into a baboon in 2012, and in that case the baboon lived for over two years. The first attempt on humans occurred in 2021: a pig kidney was transplanted to a woman kept alive artificially with signs of renal dysfunction. The procedure was carried out at New York University Langone Health and used a pig whose genes had been modified to eliminate a molecule in its tissues that causes almost immediate rejection.
Previous
Subsequently, other kidney transplants from pigs to humans were performed, but always in brain-dead patients. The following year, in 2022, the first transplant of a heart from a genetically modified pig on a human was performed in Baltimore. His name was David Bennett Sr, 57 years old, but he only survived two months. Last year, again in the United States, a second pig heart transplant involved a 58-year-old man: however, the patient died after six weeks. One of the biggest obstacles is still avoiding organ rejection. A path that will still require efforts, but which could represent a turning point in the future. Currently, in Italy alone, there are around 8 thousand people waiting for a transplant in Italy: 5800 people are waiting for a new kidney, 1000 for a liver, 700 for a heart, 300 for a lung, 200 for a pancreas and 5 for the intestine.
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