A Third Person Has Received a Transplant of a Genetically Engineered Pig Kidney

An Alabama woman became the third person to receive a pig kidney transplant, doctors at NYU Langone Health announced Tuesday. Towana Looney, 53, underwent the procedure on November 25 and was discharged December 6.

Her kidney came from a pig with 10 genetic modifications designed to prevent organ rejection. The surgery follows two previous pig kidney transplants this year -- Richard Slayman at Massachusetts General Hospital, who died two months post-surgery from cardiac complications, and Lisa Pisano at NYU Langone, whose transplanted kidney was removed after 47 days due to blood flow issues.

Apparently there's side (order) effects

[Miles_O'Toole]

The woman has been asked to avoid the local pub's Sunday brunch buffet after her repeated attempts to get up on the counter and lie down next to the scrambled eggs.

Re:

[kungfool]

I know observant Jews can’t get biologic heart valves from pigs, so I would assume the same applies to Muslims.

Re:muslims

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

Three ethical issues around pig heart transplants [bbc.com] Article only mentions Judaism, not Islam, even though Islam is grouped into this objection --

Pigs are chosen as the relevant organs are a similar size to humans' - and because pigs are relatively easy to breed and raise in captivity.

But how does this choice affect Jewish or Muslim patients, whose religions have strict rules on the animal?

Although Jewish law forbids Jews from raising or eating pigs, receiving a pig heart is "not in any way a violation of the Jewish dietary laws", says Dr Moshe Freedman, a senior London rabbi who sits on the UK Health Department's Moral and Ethical Advisory Group (MEAG).

"Since the primary concern in Jewish law is the preservation of human life, a Jewish patient would be obligated to accept a transplant from an animal if this offered the greatest chance of survival and the best quality of life in the future," Rabbi Freedman told the BBC.

Re:

[Deal In One]

Someone (a muslim) once told me that when it comes to a life and death issue / have no other choice, halal rules can be discarded. So I guess pig organ implants are fine for muslims, since its a potential life and death issue.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

That's applying logic to religion.

Don't do that. The domain of religion strongly objects to the application of logic, or any form of thinking that may lead to disagreement with "received authority".

Vegans

[Roger W Moore]

The more interesting moral question is would a vegan be willing to get it, and more specifically those who are vegan because they object to the exploitation of animals? It's one thing to forego a burger, but quite a different thing to forego a life saving operation.

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[Rinnon]

The more interesting moral question [...]

That's subjective. Not unlike the answer to your question.

Re:

[Roger W Moore]

Yes it is - you do realise that it's ok to post subjective opinions right? However, the thinking behind my opinion is that arbitrary rules in a religion have arbitrary responses from adherents: either they follow them or rationalize them away. They have no personal "stake" in the rule, it is something that they don't really choose themselves. However, vegans are different because they often claim to follow the rules out of deliberate, personal choice often based on their personal moral beliefs. Hence you le

Re:

[test321]

My vegan friend who once was in a serious medical condition told me she'd refuse treatments based on injections of animal products (e.g. horse-derived antibodies). That is even though the animal would not die from the process, but she would risk her life in refusing.

Self esteem

[mjwx]

Also a huge blow to people who sometimes think that some days their only value are the organs that can be scooped out to help others.

Re:

[tragedy]

Depends. Technically speaking, a pig kidney could be removed without killing the pig. For a kidney transplant, the best possible procedure would be to have the pig alive in one operating theater, extract a kidney from the live pig, then take it to the other theater where the patient has already been opened up, then graft it immediately. That gives the best chance of immediate kidney function. Of course, the way researchers tend to operate, they would probably then kill the pig, or they would do two human pa

Doctor, doctor

[TJHook3r]

Doctor, I feel like a pig. How long have I felt like this? About a wee-eek

Sign me up

[Hecatonchires]

Hopefully this will improve waiting list times :/ I still need to lose a bunch of weight to even get on the list :(

Re:

[RockDoctor]

Hopefully this will improve waiting list times

Probably not a huge amount - AIUI, the pig in question needs several (around a dozen) genetic modifications specific to the immune system of the transplant recipient. Then it needs raising to an age where it's comparable in size to the patient's kidneys. Neither of those are going to be cheap tasks. At medical grade ; for example, the pig was probably grown in a germ-free sow, and c-sectioned under a germ-free protocol then reared (like the sow) to adult size u

Re:

[tragedy]

I'm not sure you know how long the waiting times are in the US. Especially if you have O-type blood. I don't know what blood type the GP has but if they have O blood and they're not even on the list due to other health issues, it is pretty much guaranteed that a pig could be genetically modified and raised to maturity before they would ever get a kidney from the waiting list. Pigs only take about six months to reach the size where the kidney would be big enough and pig gestation is only 3 months, three week

Re:

[RockDoctor]

Sure, it might be expensive, but keeping someone on dialysis is also very, very expensive, so grafts are usually much preferred, even with such an expense to procure the organ.

It's like diabetes and insulin injection : the injections (and dietary management) can, to a degree, even out the worst excesses and deficiencies of blood-glucose levels ; but it's nowhere near as good as the fine control of a properly functioning pancreas (and associated hormones, sensory circuits and biochemical palaver). Dialysis e

Re:

[tragedy]

It's like diabetes and insulin injection : the injections (and dietary management) can, to a degree, even out the worst excesses and deficiencies of blood-glucose levels ; but it's nowhere near as good as the fine control of a properly functioning pancreas (and associated hormones, sensory circuits and biochemical palaver). Dialysis every second to third day may keep the toxin levels in the blood below $really_bad_level%, but they still get above $desirably_low_level$. I'm thinking of a friend who died last year after 50 years of "perforating" with insulin. After losing vision in one eye about 5 years ago, and a leg a year for the last couple of years of his life and being in hospital for a lot of the last 3 years between one "crisis" and another.

Oh, absolutely. Dialysis just slows your decline. Dialysis patients (many of whom are also diabetic) are in and out of the hospital all the time. They are constantly anemic. Their hemoglobin levels could be raised to a healthy level, but medical protocol forbids it, so they are maintained at a theoretical 10 to 11 mg/Dl although that number is realistically kept at more like 9 on average, dipping below and above that. They have constant problems with things like basic breathing due to pulmonary edema and pl

Re:

[RockDoctor]

since there may be an advantage to an even larger kidney to replace the functionality of two kidneys in the recipient).

I think (not that I've researched this closely) that there is a sufficient track record of transplant from a large donor into a small recipient (particularly parent into child) but also from a small donor into a large recipient, that the organ fairly rapidly re-sizes to accommodate the workload it has. Similar things happen when one kidney is going bad - the other can take up a lot of slac