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Medicine

NYU Surgeons Claim Advance In Transplant of Pig Kidney To a Human 88

Posted by BeauHD from the lifesaving-therapy dept.
A genetically altered pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead man has continued to function for 32 days, an advance toward the possible use of animal organs in humans, surgeons at NYU Langone Health said Wednesday. The Washington Post reports: The kidney was not rejected in the minutes after it was transplanted -- a problem in xenotransplantation, the use of organs from a different species. It began producing urine and took over the functions of a human kidney such as filtering toxins, the physicians said at a news conference. Also Wednesday, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine published a similar case study, of a brain-dead patient who received two pig kidneys that underwent 10 gene alterations earlier this year. The kidneys were not rejected and continued to function for seven days. The results were peer-reviewed and published in the journal JAMA Surgery.

In the NYU Langone transplant, the specially bred pig from which the kidney was procured required just one genetic alteration, to remove a protein that human immune systems attack shortly after surgery. Surgeons also implanted the pig's thymus gland, which helps train the immune system, by sewing it under the outer layer of the kidney, and used immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection later on. Managing the condition of the brain-dead man, who on Wednesday still had a heart beat and was breathing with the aid of a ventilator, for an extended period of time also requires extensive efforts by critical care personnel. But the work has revealed information about longer-term use of animal organs, the doctors said. The researchers expect to follow the patient for another month.

With the results released Wednesday, both Montgomery and Locke said they can envision moving toward the early stage of clinical trials to identify the safety of transplanting pig kidneys into live humans. [...] The genetic alteration in the NYU Langone study knocked out a carbohydrate molecule known as Alpha-gal, for short. Humans do not produce the substance and create high levels of antibodies against it, which has in the past proven a formidable obstacle to xenotransplantation. "Now that it can be completely removed from the pig, that allows us to move forward," Montgomery said. Still, the team said, pigs have 1,000 proteins that humans don't, and it can take 10 to 14 days to see how a person's immune system reacts to them. Getting beyond that stage with this patient at NYU Langone is a first sign that long-term viability of the organ and patient is possible, they said.
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NYU Surgeons Claim Advance In Transplant of Pig Kidney To a Human More

NYU Surgeons Claim Advance In Transplant of Pig Kidney To a Human

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  • "Chinese pigs have vanished all across the country as they fear being taken as replacements for the CCP's current political prisoner organ harvesting program to keep their elderly politicians alive. A spiderweb in a local farmer's barn spelled out the words 'Some pig', 'terrific', 'radiant', and 'humble'. These mysterious messages were destroyed and the betrayer of the People spider located and smashed shortly before the Hero Pig of the People was rescued for his noble voluntary kidney sacrifice to preser

  • the advance that needs to happen isn't in the transplant of animal bits to humans but in the subsequent long-term surviving of said humans.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      To me ot's not really an advance and there are better paths in the "tech tree" to take. Artificial organs, growing your own organs from your own cells.

      Organs have stem cells and stem cells can migrate.

      https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
      https://digital.library.unt.ed... [unt.edu]

      Also, the max lifespan of pigs is only about 15-20 years. Not good if you get a transplant at 50 and it starts failing when you're 60 or so.

  • Why isn't it just ethical to refuse this barbaric treatment unless the pig knowingly donated his organ?

    • Oh, but he was delicious.

      • Indeed. And if animals weren't meant for eating, they wouldn't be made out of food.

        Besides, as a recipient of a human kidney transplant, I know full well that solid organ transplants don't last forever; typically the patient would otherwise outlive their donated organ had it not failed. For kidneys in particular, the immunosuppressive drugs themselves cause damage to the kidneys and contribute to the ultimate and typically inevitable loss of graft. A pig genetically modified means either an (for all practic

        • Unlike Jews, Muslime have an "escape clause" in their holy book: it explicitly states if in danger, eat pig, as you are human and are above pigs. Don't know the exact wording.

        • What if scientists concentrated on genetically modifying you so you don't make the mistakes you made to need a kidney?

          • I didn't make any mistakes. Google "IgA nephropathy".

            If somebody could figure out what genes are behind that, that would be a big deal because currently we know next to nothing about it, and it's the leading cause of renal failure in the world, primarily affecting Asian populations.

            • So you have an arbitrary genetic condition that you want to take advantage of another arbitrary genetic condition in an animal you slaughter against its will to fix? No offense, but what gives you the right? Just might?

              • In a nutshell? Yeah.

                Though nobody knows whether it's genetic or just environmental. The high prevalence of the condition within Asians suggest there may be some hereditary factor at play here, but despite much research, (again, this is the #1 reason why somebody would need a transplant worldwide, so lots of research is being done) none has been identified. I myself don't even have any known Asian ancestry. It may very well be environmental. We just don't know.

              • I eat a vegan diet. I don't believe in unnecessary cruelty toward animals. I also consider factory farming to be a crime against not only the animals involved, but toward humanity as well. The things that happen in those places aren't much better for us than they are for them.

                HOWEVER: if I have to choose between human life and a pig? Not a hard choice. People are more important. I won't eat a pig, and I wish others didn't either, but, if one has to give up its life so a human can live, then that's wh

    • Re:What happened to the pig? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by quenda ( 644621 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @10:48PM (#63773628)

      The pigs have been selectively bred such that this is their sole purpose in life. It will make them complete.

      Further, since they are free of alpha-gal, the pork will be of great value to those suffering from Alpha-gal syndrome. [wikipedia.org] (mammalian meat allergy) Nothing will be wasted.

    • Why isn't it just ethical to refuse this barbaric treatment unless the pig knowingly donated his organ?

      There's a branch of ethics named Utilitarianism [wikipedia.org] that discusses this. Basically, utilitarianism puts an ethical value on increasing happiness and/or reducing suffering.

      One human characteristic that animals don't have is an awareness of the future. We can make future plans, we can run simulations in our minds and choose the one that is best, we can make mental avatars and let them take risks that we would not take. We have discovered time. Pigs don't have this sense, almost no animal does.

      For this reason, one

      • I knew I was responding to a troll, but thought that answering with a straight face would be fun.

        Also, couldn't pass up the opportunity to quote Ultron in a post about ethics.

        • Props for getting Ultron in there.

          Are you certain animals can't plan? For example, my dog buries a treat then comes back to that hole days later. Is that not planning for the future? When I had 2 dogs, both would get a chew stick at the same time, Dog A would get distracted and go away for 10 seconds to bark out the window. Dog B would snarf down the other dog's treat in a split second then go back to her treat and pretend nothing happened when Dog A came back for his treat. No concept of time there?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbengt ( 874751 )

            Are you certain animals can't plan?

            Not the original poster but, yes, I'm fairly certain that animals like your dogs (or mine) can't reason out a plan for the future.
            Your first example of burying a treat is an instinctive behaviour. Remembering where it was buried is more than most animals can do (though sense of smell might be as much of a factor as memory), but it's not planning.
            Your second example is just taking advantage of a situation, no planning required.

      • Isn't the obvious alternative just live with it?

        Why not legalize fentanyl so kidney disease sufferers who can't get pig transplants can kill themselves painlessly? Do you need everyone to choose the violent option to keep your economy going, or something?

        • Why not legalize fentanyl so kidney disease sufferers who can't get pig transplants can kill themselves painlessly?

          There's an argument to be made for allowing suicide in cases where the ongoing suffering cannot be remediated. Sufferers of bone cancer are in tremendous pain, can't be cured, and might legitimately choose to end their suffering early. In the Utilitarian sense, this reduces suffering, but has to be balanced against the loss of future potential. If there's no great future potential, then it makes sense.

          Generally speaking, suicide is considered a sickness that should be cured. If someone with suicidal thought

          • Why did my brother commit suicide at 49 despite having a lot of future potential as a good little homo neoliberalis, with a high-paying corporate managerial job? Did he get the best available medical treatment for his condition (therapy, drugs, long cushy rehabs on the company dime, etc.), and did it fail to help him, because his real condition was believing his economics professors then finding out that the pursuit of money left him bereft of spiritual reasons to realize his future potential (partly becaus

            • Why did my brother commit suicide at 49 despite having a lot of future potential as a good little homo neoliberalis, with a high-paying corporate managerial job? Did he get the best available medical treatment for his condition (therapy, drugs, long cushy rehabs on the company dime, etc.), and did it fail to help him, because his real condition was believing his economics professors then finding out that the pursuit of money left him bereft of spiritual reasons to realize his future potential (partly because of how utilitarians treat animals)?

              I don't know anything about your brother, but he was responsible for the choices that he made, just as you are responsible for the choices in your life that you make.

              Putting the blame on external events is the wrong tactic. Yes, external events happen, but they don't *cause* you to do anything - you decide for yourself what to do about them.

              Instead of feeling bad about external events, consider the events themselves as bad (or good), then decide on a set of actions that make your life better. You don't dire

              • Why isn't the kidney beggar responsible for whatever they did to need a kidney? What if they morally should respond by not relying on killing animals to treat the external condition that is really their responsibility to deal with, as you point out brother should have?

                • For the vast majority of ESRD patients, the causes of it are unavoidable. Diabetic nephropathy is the only notable avoidable cause. Mine was IgA nephropathy. Another common one is PKD. There's basically nothing that you can do to stop the progression of either disease.

                  • Is there anything the pig can do to stop you killing it for its organs?

                    • The pig in this case would be bred for exactly this purpose, and had this need not arisen, the pig never would have even existed to begin with. So what you're asking for is, what can the pig so to prevent you from creating it to begin with? And the answer is: That would create a temporal paradox, so it's impossible to begin with. Having said that, what else would you do with the pig that was created for this? Aside from making bacon, that doesn't count.

                    • That raises an interesting question... would this logic apply to a human born for a specific task? If you were to breed a bunch of humans for some thing generally considered unsavory or unethical, does that now make that thing acceptable since those people wouldn't exist otherwise?

            • Perhaps he couldn't stand the trolling anymore?

              • Were economists trolling him when they promised him money buys happiness?

                • Money doesn't buy happiness but it is a lot easier to be rich and happy than poor and happy.

                  I've been so poor I had negative net worth and couldn't afford to buy a soda for 25 cents. Now I'm a 1%er. I assure you that all else being equal life is a lot better rich than poor.

                  But money by itself is not enough to be happy, if you're a miserable wretch and hate everyone and everything then you'll be just as miserable with money.

        • The point of this research is that they sooner or later can transplant a liver, or a heart.
          Or in your case: a brain ... oops sorry, got carried away.

          • Having a bad liver myself, will I refuse any medicine that relies on animal testing, because it is immoral and I want no part of it?

            • You may as well just skip Western medicine entirely then. Virtually all of it has involved animal testing somewhere along the development path. Drugs, surgery, supplements, you name it.

              Take for example diabetes: We had no idea what the pancreas even did until a doctor removed it from a dog in order to induce diabetes in the dog, and from there refined insulin from animal pancreases in order to determine that injecting that into humans treated diabetes. It wasn't until 1982 that humulin was produced using ge

    • It's a pig. If we can save a human by butchering a pig, we're gonna kill the pig. The human can refuse but the pig gets no say in the matter. And it likely never will.

    • Try it with the brain, then if things work out, you can ask for its consent.

    • It is ethical because the pig is an animal and does not have rights or the ability to give consent.

      The pig only has 2 reasons to exist:
      1) to provide a kidney
      2) bacon is yummy

      • If you give the pig a choice to go under the knife or not, is it pretty obvious what its preference is?

        • Pigs do not and can not be given choices. They are animals. The pig is an organ creation mechanism (in this specific case) and bacon in the general case.

          The only reason pigs even exist is because humans made them. The original wild boar is a very different creature.

          I wish slashdot supported emojis. This is the right time to spray pig emojis everywhere. Everyone knows everything is better with butter. Except bacon. Bacon is great all by itself.

          Oink!

        • If you showed a pig a knife, it would neither have any idea what it is, nor would it care what it is as it's more likely to just ignore it.

          Besides, you'd put down the pig with a captive bolt pistol long before a knife was involved, and it would have no idea what was coming or what was even happening.

          I've seen a cow get put down with one out in the open, and the cow next to it saw the whole thing and didn't care, it just waited patiently for its turn.

    • Why isn't it just ethical to refuse this barbaric treatment unless the pig knowingly donated his organ?

      The same reason we enjoy bacon without the expressed written consent of the pig in question.

      Hey, you get some perks when you are at the top of the food chain.

      • Do you morally need the pig's consent before eating bacon? Have you chosen immorality? Does bacon really fill the spiritual void within, or does it just give you colon cancer?

        • Do you morally need the pig's consent before eating bacon? Have you chosen immorality? Does bacon really fill the spiritual void within, or does it just give you colon cancer?

          I'm a human.

          I'm at the top of the food chain.

          The world is my dominion....pigs/hogs are part of that world.

          I will use whatever resources in this world I need for sustenance, and life/lifestyle.

          There is no spiritual or moral to it....pigs are food, and have other uses too.

          I take it you've never gone hunting before, right?

    • Well, we'll just have to wait for Douglas Adams to write that into his new post dead Hitchhikers novel.

  • That's the genius level "weird trick", pioneered by Kazuhiko Yamada, that's makling this xenotransplantation stuff work. Not downplaying all the work Revivicor (the company that engineered the pigs in the study) has been doing in modding pigs though.

    • Why do I not want to have any part in any organs produced by these offensive ppl?

      Why do I empathize with the pigs more than with the recipients?

      • Maybe you are a sociopath, with a depressed empathy with humanity, but normal empathy for non-humans? Some psychologists claim it's narcissism, but I suspect that's more usually for people that care more about their cat than their human neighbours.
        There is also research that suggests that we can more easily empathize with the more helpless, regardless of species. Anyone who thinks a pig is more helpless than a human who is about to die from kidney failure has an interesting worldview.

        • Why should I empathize with a humanity that has consistently marginalized me? Is it more fun to be around animals because they have better personalities?

          • They probably marginalize you because you're not just a dick, you're a bag and a half of dicks. Which is fine if that's what you want to be, but if you treat other people like shit the way you do, then expect to be ignored, or worse, shat upon.

            The best thing somebody in your position can do is just avoid other people, say for example by not posting to slashdot. You'll spare yourself a lot of grief that way. But if you like to inflict that upon yourself, then by all means, continue posting.

      • Because there is something wrong with you.

        • Will you force-feed me meat to cure me?

          • Lol what does eating meat have to do with your putting a pig above a human?

            Omg that's funny. One of the worse arguments I've seen here all week and that's a lot for slashdot.

            Would you like to try again?

            • Depending on what philosophy you follow, killing a pig for food so you can live is selfish and you are still ultimately hurting yourself. A devout Buddhist would not eat an animal and would choose to die before taking an animal to save their own life.

              If everything is connected, and I mean literally everything, then to harm another creature is to harm the self. You will be reborn and based on your karma, may end up being the pig in your next lifetime if you were an overly self serving human.

              That's probably n

              • 1) I love animals, I especially love tasty animals
                2) I am not Buddhist or Hindu or any religion nor believe in karma nor reincarnation nor a Jew on a cross coming back or any of that
                3) I am hurting myself by eating a pig, yes, because I'm clotting my arteries
                4) They probably are trolling but this is slashdot and I've seen MUCH dumber things here posted very seriously
                5) This entire site is for the l0lz, none of this actually matters

  • There's research and instances where 'brain dead' people are actually aware

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-en... [bbc.com]

    These procedures should only occur with the patients preexisting consent. Or if the patients kidneys no longer work.

    I hope the original kidneys were not removed, and the pig kidneys were added in with at least one original kidney left behind.

    • That article you linked to doesn't say how the person was diagnosed as brain dead, it seems the hospital messed up procedure (didn't setup the machine properly? who knows). The reason it seems to be like a procedure thing rather than actual brain death is that nobody is claiming he came back from brain death. It seems like the brain death verification process wasn't followed.

      Anyway, regarding them keeping one kidney there .. what would be the point of the original kidney though? The dude died because his ki

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      The person in your link was a very rare case and there may have been a medical screw-up. But note that in the absence of a plan for experimentation or organ donation, they would have just turned the respirator off and he would have been truly dead.

      His case was extremely rare in that not only did he return to breathing on his own, but he is having a meaningful and potentially near full recovery.

      I guess it's a bit odd to think that they came very close to removing his organs and so unknowingly killing him, bu

  • I'm thinking that a pig kidney was not going to solve his problem. Of course, a pig brain would probably not have solved it, either.

    • Is the patient just a convenient test subject for the doctors keen on sadistically cutting up squealing, innocent, protesting pigs, for the attention? In other words, is this about saving humans or aggrandizing animal torturers?

      • If I was brain-dead I would love it if they used me for medical research I like this that has the potential to help so many desperate people in the future.

      • I doubt the bacon was squealing. If the bacon is thrashing around then removing the kidney will make a mess.

        They drugged it, removed the kidney, then cooked up the rest.

        • I think it's unlikely they drug it first. They probably knock it out with a captive bolt pistol first. It'll die soon after but there's plenty of time (relatively speaking) to harvest.

          • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            Interesting. I wonder if they'd use that in a medical situation, though...?

            Either way, the end result is still bacon and transplantable kidneys.

            I have seen random ass "research" using cats in university. It was pretty sick stuff and their research was crap. They only did it to generate papers for their PhDs no one will ever read. I considered that truly abusive animal cruelty. But if a pig has to die for a human to live, then my vote is with the human and yes I hope the

            • So the captive bolt pistol basically knocks them out instantly, then over a few hours their brain swells up due to the trauma and kind of crushes itself, but it does so in a way that doesn't let brain matter into the blood stream, which is VERY bad even if you only want bacon. Older captive bolt pistols sometimes did that in the initial impact, which could lead to the consumers getting spongiform encephalopathy, but that's no longer an issue.

              Maybe they'd use drugs, I don't know, but I don't see any need for

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      Of course, it won't solve his problem. They deliberately chose a test subject who was beyond further potential harm or suffering. That is, he is brain dead. He has ceased to be a living person.

      The hope, of course, is to learn enough to help others who are not beyond saving.

  • Ultimately we need to understand fetal development and stem cell development and signaling so we can grow organs from our own cells, likely on frameworks.

  • It has been a long road getting things up to here. Probably needs a few decades more until this becomes routine.

  • I doubt it will get the mullah's stamp of approval...

  • ... in the middle east and other muslim areas. Accept an organ from an "unclean" animal (whatever the fuck that means - have they ever seen a sheeps or cows backside?) or die.... tricky...

  • I thought it is similar like putting an Elephant into a fridge?

    Open pig, remove kidney.
    Open human, remove old kidney.
    Insert new kidney.
    Close human.
    Slaughter pig.

    Sausage ... BBQ ... win!

  • Pigs without Alpha-Gal? Sounds to me like they could fund this effort purely off of selling bacon to people who have been bit by a Lone Star Tick.

  • Can we make our kidneys and other organs from our stem cells?
    That way, we don't need them from donors (dead or alive)

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