Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital announced Thursday they completed the world’s first successful transplant of a pig kidney into a living patient, a 62-year-old patient with end-stage kidney disease, a procedure doctors hope is a breakthrough in helping people whose kidneys have failed.
Rick Slayman underwent a four-hour-long procedure on Saturday to receive a genetically modified pig kidney, Massachusetts General Hospital said.
The hospital said the kidney was genetically modified to remove “harmful pig genes” and add other human genes that would improve its compatibility with humans, while scientists also deactivated pathogens in the pig donor to eliminate the risk of infection.
Slayman had been on dialysis after his kidneys—which he received through a transplant in late 2018—failed last year, according to the hospital, which noted Slayman has also lived with Type 2 diabetes and hypertension “for many years.”
Slayman also experienced severe vascular complications during dialysis, causing his blood vessels to clot and fail, which required him to be hospitalized every two weeks.
Slayman, a resident of Weymouth, Massachusetts, is “recovering well” at Massachusetts General and is expected to be discharged “soon,” though doctors will monitor him for signs of organ rejection.
Doctors from Massachusetts General told the New York Times that Slayman’s new kidney seems to be functional and he has been able to stop dialysis.
Slayman viewed the surgery “not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” he said.
Kidneys were the most requested organ for transplants in the U.S. in 2021, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration. Of the 41,354 organ transplants carried out that year, nearly 60% involved kidney transplants.
808,000. That’s the estimated number of Americans living with kidney failure, according to the American Kidney Fund. About 37 million people in the U.S. have chronic kidney disease, a condition in which damaged kidneys often fail to filter blood through the body.
Transplants involving non-human organs—a procedure known as xenotransplantation—have been increasingly studied and carried out in recent years. The FDA hasn’t directly approved xenotransplantation, though the procedure is allowed under the agency’s compassionate use provision, which allows patients with life-threatening illnesses to seek experimental treatments. Doctors hope xenotransplantation could aid the thousands of people who die annually while waiting for organ donors. Surgeons at NYU Langone Health carried out the world’s first pig kidney transplant on a braindead patient in 2021. The University of Alabama at Birmingham announced last year it carried out the same procedure for a third time, suggesting in a study xenotransplantation could help potentially cure end-stage kidney disease. Other similar transplants have been carried out over the last two years, including a 58-year-old patient who received the second-ever transplant of a pig heart. He died six weeks after surgery.
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