Sixty seconds on . . . pig kidney transplants

What’s this all about?Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has announced the world’s first successful transplantation of a genetically edited pig kidney into a 62 year old man living with end stage kidney disease.1 Richard Slayman is recovering well from the four hour operation and is expected to be discharged soon. The hospital said the procedure was a medical milestone in the quest to provide more readily available organs to patients.Is this the first pig organ transplant?It’s actually the third transplant of a pig organ into a living human. The first two, in 2022 and 2023, were pig hearts which were transplanted into patients who had run out of other options.2 Both patients died weeks after receiving their organs, however.So it’s still experimental surgery?Although pig kidneys are very similar to human kidneys it has been difficult to work out how to prevent the human immune system from rejecting them. To stop…
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