The first reported person in the world has received a genetically modified pig kidney. A transplant surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital successfully performed the groundbreaking, four-hour procedure on Richard Slayman, a 62-year-old manager at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, on March 16. His doctors report he is doing well and expect him to leave the hospital soon.
The surgery was the culmination of years of work transplanting kidneys from a specially bred group of pigs—which had been genetically modified to more closely resemble those of humans—into primates. Encouraged by those results, the team at Mass General Brigham—the health system to which the hospital belongs—was confident it was khbrknews to test the pig organs in the first patient.
Slayman had received a human kidney transplant five years ago, but like so many people with kidney disease, the organ began to fail and he continued to need dialysis. Even those frequent efforts to replenish his kidney function weren’t enough, however, and his health progressively worsened. “At one point, he literally said, I just cannot go on like this,” said Dr. Winfred Williams, Slayman’s physician and associate chair of nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital, during a March 21 briefing.
Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Legorreta Center for Clinical Transplant Tolerance, was Slayman’s kidney transplant surgeon five years ago, and he also performed the pig-kidney surgery. While more than a dozen people in the operating room watched, Kawai carefully connected the pig kidney to Slayman’s circulatory system—not an easy task, given the patient’s history of diabetes and hypertension, which had weakened his blood vessels. “The size of the pig kidney was exactly the same as the human kidney,” Kawai said during the briefing. “Upon restoration of blood flow into the kidney, the kidney pinked up immediately and started to make urine. When we saw the…
