Pig kidney in a human body? This experiment is working fine a month later

Surgeons from NYU Langone Health announced on Wednesday that they successfully transplanted a pig's kidney into a brain-dead man, and for over a month, it has functioned normally, according to a report by the Associated Press (AP).

The New York team hopes to replicate the procedure in living patients eventually. This marks the longest a pig kidney has survived and functioned in a person, although a deceased one. Scientists are on course to record the kidney's performance for a second month.

Dr Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone's transplant institute, was quoted as saying by AP that so far, it looks like the transplanted pig kidney is going to work like a human organ. On July 14, Montgomery said that the kidney looked even better than a human kidney after he replaced the brain-dead man's own kidneys with a single kidney from a genetically modified pig and watched it immediately start producing urine.

For decades, scientists have failed to transplant animal organs to humans because people's immune systems attacked the foreign tissue. Scientists have now begun using genetically modified pigs to solve the problem. In 2022, surgeons from the University of Maryland transplanted a gene-edited pig heart into a dying man. He could survive for only two months before the organ failed for reasons that scientists are still trying to comprehend.

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The family of Maurice "Mo" Miller from upstate New York agreed to donate his body for the experiment after he died suddenly at 57 with a previously undiagnosed brain cancer, ruling out routine organ donation. The chance that pig kidneys might one day help solve a supply-demand mismatch of transplantable organs helped convince Miller's family to donate his body.

His sister Mary Miller-Duffy was quoted as saying by AP that she struggled with the decision, but this is what her brother would have wanted to do. She added that her brother would live on forever in the medical books.

The Food and Drug Administration is deliberating whether to allow some small but rigorous studies of pig heart or kidney transplants in volunteer patients, rather than depending on Hail Mary attempts. A Hail Mary attempt is a term derived from American football which refers to a a last-ditch attempt to score against heavy odds. The NYU experiment is one of the attempts that seek to accelerate the start of such clinical trials. On August 16, the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported that a pair of pig kidneys worked normally inside another donated body for seven days.

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 Montgomery, the NYU kidney transplant surgeon who also received his own heart transplant stated that these attempts are crucial when it comes to seeking answers to remaining questions in a setting where researchers are not putting someone's life in jeopardy.