Let’s get Looney53, became the third person to receive a transplant pork kidney, a still very experimental health practice, announced this Tuesday, December 17, a scientific team from the United States.
“I feel like I have been given a second chance at life,” the American patient declared in a statement three weeks after the operation.
Looney donated one of his kidneys to his mother in 1999 and had been on dialysis for eight years after a complication during pregnancy damaged his remaining one.
The American, resident of Alabama, in the south of USAhad been waiting for a transplant since 2017, but had not been able to find a compatible donor.
Given the deterioration of his health, on November 25 he received a genetically modified pig kidney so that the organ would not be immediately rejected by his body.
The operation took place at the NYU Langone hospital in New York, a pioneer in this field.
It is about the “latest promising development from an emerging surgical practice being heralded as the solution to the organ supply crisis,” commented the medical team.
Xenotransplants (use of non-human cells, tissues and organs in people) are expected to solve the chronic shortage of organ donations in a country where there are more than 100 thousand patients on the waiting listof which more than 90 thousand need a kidney.
This practice, long considered science fictionhas benefited from progress in gene editing and control of the immune system response, which limits the risk of rejection.
The same medical team has carried out several xenotransplantations in recent years, including the world’s first of a pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead patient in September 2021. The organ functioned well for a few days.
In 2024, the NYU Langone hospital in New York transplanted pig kidneys into two more seriously ill patients, Rick Slayman and Lisa Pisano, who died a few weeks later.
In 2022, another American scientific team performed the world’s first pig heart transplant in a person. But the man, operated on by surgeons from the University of Maryland, died two months after the operation.
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