A 62-year-old man experiencing end-stage kidney disease became the world's first conscious human to receive a genetically engineered pig kidney via transplant. The surgery, conducted on March 16 in Massachusetts, has so far been considered a success. If he doesn't experience significant signs of immune rejection in the coming days, the man will go home on Saturday.
The patient's new kidney comes from eGenesis, a startup aimed at ending the transplant organ shortage. For the last nine years, eGenesis has been testing the viability of "HuCo" organs, or pig livers, kidneys, and hearts altered to suit the human body. It uses CRISPR to engineer a pig's DNA to include six human genes and discard four porcine genes. Genetically engineered pigs are housed in a pathogen-controlled environment until an organ is needed; at that point, the organ is tissue-matched with an animal or human, checked for viruses, and packaged for transport to a laboratory or hospital.
While surgeons successfully implanted a genetically engineered pig kidney into a braindead human last year, Saturday's procedure marks the first time a neurologically healthy human has received such an organ. Having lived with type 2 diabetes and hypertension for several years, Richard Slayman received a kidney from a deceased human donor in 2018. Still, he began to experience signs of rejection five years later. He's been undergoing dialysis regularly until this month when a single FDA "compassionate use" clearance made him eligible to receive an eGenesis pig kidney.
In its announcement Thursday, Massachusetts General Hospital—Harvard University's largest teaching hospital—said the patient received infusions of two novel immunosuppressant drugs alongside the four-hour surgery. Preventing rejection is priority number one for transplant teams and their patients, whose bodies will naturally fight against non-native tissue without (or even with) immunosuppressant drugs.
Five days after his transplant, Slayman is reportedly recovering well. Should his procedure prove successful in the long term, Slayman's experience could pave the way for the hundreds of thousands of people awaiting donor kidneys at any given time.
"At Massachusetts General Hospital alone, there are over 1,400 patients on the waiting list for a kidney transplant," Dr. Leonardo Riella, the hospital's medical director for kidney transplantation, said. "Some of these patients will unfortunately die or get too sick to be transplanted due to the long waiting time on dialysis. I am firmly convinced that xenotransplantation represents a promising solution to the organ shortage crisis."
