What is a xenotransplant? Man dies two months after receiving pig kidney
The first person to undergo a pig kidney transplant has died almost two months after the surgery. What is a xenotransplant, the procedure he underwent?
Richard “Rick” Layman, the first person to receive a pig kidney transplant, has died almost two months after he had the procedure at the age of 62. He was going through end-stage kidney cancer.
The Massachusetts General Hospital said they believed the implanted genetically modified pig kidney would last at least two years. The transplant team also said they had no reason to believe that Layman had died because of the transplant.
Layman was the first living person to have received this kind of kidney transplant. Two men had undergone heart transplants from pigs, though they also died after a few months.
Last month, doctors at NYU Langone Health transplanted another genetically modified pig kidney into Lisa Pisano, a woman from New Jersey who was near death. Transplant experts are keeping an eye on how her health will develop.
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What is a xenotransplant?
The surgeries Layman and Pisano went through were xenotransplants. This procedure is a type of transplantation where an organ or tissue is transferred from one species to another.
The prefix “xeno-” means “foreign,” so a xenotransplant involves transplanting organs or tissues from a donor of a different species into a recipient of another species.
In a medical context, xenotransplantation usually refers to the use of animal organs or tissues by human recipients.
Xenotransplantation has the potential to address the shortage of human donor organs for transplantation and could provide life-saving treatments for patients with organ failure or chronic diseases.
However, this procedure had often failed in the past because the human body immediately rejected the foreign animal tissue. Recent surgeries have used genetically modified pigs so that their organs would be more similar to those of people.
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Xenotransplants face medical and ethical issues
Though potentially life-saving, xenotransplatation presents significant scientific, medical, ethical, and safety challenges.
These include concerns about the risk of transmitting infectious diseases from animals to humans (zoonotic infections), immune rejection of xenografts by the recipient’s immune system, and ethical considerations related to animal welfare and genetic modification.
Researchers continue to explore the potential of xenotransplantation as a viable treatment option for various medical conditions, but significant research and development are still needed to overcome the technical and ethical hurdles associated with this approach.