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Medical history was made at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston when a pig kidney was successfully transplanted into a human being for the first time ever.
The human being, 62-year-old Richard Slayman, who received a kidney transplant from a human deceased donor in December 2018 and had been on dialysis, became the first successful pig kidney transplant in a living recipient after a four-hour operation on Saturday.
“It really is a groundbreaking milestone,” said Dr. Winfred Williams, the associate chief of the nephrology division at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Should the kidney continue to work well and this is a success, I think it represents a breakthrough in a number of different areas.”
Xenotransplantation, the term for animal-to-human transplant, has not always been successful as two pig-to-human heart transplants in the United States ended with the patients dying in less than two months.
The pig kidney used for Slayman’s transplant was genetically modified and five days after his surgery his body has shown no signs of rejecting it. How long it will last is another question for which medical professionals do not currently have an answer.
If Slayman’s pig kidney turns into something that can be performed on a large scale, then dialysis “will become obsolete,” Dr. Leonardo V. Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Mass General told the New York Times.
“I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” Slayman, who has been living with Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, said in a statement released by the hospital.
“Our hope is that this transplant approach will offer a lifeline to millions of patients worldwide who are suffering from kidney failure,” Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, the hospital’s director for clinical transplant tolerance, said in the statement.