On Tuesday, doctors in Boston confirmed that for the first time, surgeons have transplanted a kidney from a genetically modified pig into a living person.
Richard Slayman, 62, who is suffering from end-stage kidney disease, received the organ in a four-hour procedure at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The hospital announced he's doing well and is expected to be discharged soon.
"I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive," Slayman said in a statement released by the hospital.
The procedure is the latest news in efforts to create genetically modified pigs to produce kidneys, livers, hearts, and other organs to help fix the shortage of organs for people in need of transplants, reported NPR.
"Our hope is that this transplant approach will offer a lifeline to millions of patients worldwide who are suffering from kidney failure," said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, the hospital's director for clinical transplant tolerance, in the hospital statement.
The race is now on as several biotech companies are working to develop a supply of cloned pigs whose DNA has been genetically modified so that human bodies won't reject them or spread pig viruses to people and cause other problems.
The kidney Slayman received in Boston came from a pig created by eGenesis of Cambridge, Mass. The eGenesis pigs are bred with 69 genetic modifications to prepare organs for human transplantation.
"We are grateful for the courageous contribution of the patient and to the advancement of transplantation science," Mike Curtis, chief executive officer for eGenesis, expressed in a statement.
"This represents a new frontier in medicine and demonstrates the potential of genome engineering to change the lives of millions of patients."
More than 103,000 people are currently on an organ waitlist, and approximately 17 die every day due to the shortage, according to NPR.
Federal statistics show that end-stage renal disease is 3.8 times more common among Black people than white people in the US.
The transplant "represents a potential breakthrough in solving one of the more intractable problems in our field, that being unequal access for ethnic minority patients to the opportunity for kidney transplants due to the extreme donor organ shortage and other system-based barriers," said Dr. Winfred Williams, the kidney specialist treating Slayman, who is a Black man.
The downside to the process is that the research also raises a few question marks. The possibility of spreading animal viruses to humans or slaughtering thousands of animals every year to harvest their organs are just a few examples. There's also the added fear of testing the organs on severely ill patients.
"I think we need to be very, very careful," L. Syd M. Johnson, a bioethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, told NPR.
"I have a lot of concerns about a therapy that is very much unproven."
Slayman initially received a human kidney for his procedure after having been on dialysis for seven years, according to the hospital. However, the kidney began to show signs of failure after roughly five years, prompting Slayman's need to resume dialysis last May.
"When my transplanted kidney began failing in 2023, I again trusted my care team at MGH to meet my goals of not just improving my quality of life but extending it," Slayman said in the hospital's statement, adding the doctors explained the "pros and cons of this procedure."
