The 62-year-old man has recovered well from the operation.
For a 62-year-old a man has been successfully transplanted with a pig’s kidney, the first in the world.
The operation was performed on Saturday, March 16, in the United States, at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. The hospital bulletin according to the organ transplant, it took four hours and the man is recovering well from the operation.
According to the hospital, the successful operation is a historic milestone in the field of medicine, where organs or tissues are transplanted from one species to another.
According to the release, for example, transplanting organs from animals to humans can serve as a possible solution to the global shortage of organs.
From kidney disease the affected man received a human kidney in an organ transplant at the same hospital in 2018. Five years later, the transplanted organ stopped working and the man had to return to dialysis to replace the function of the kidney.
According to the doctors, the man’s future prospects did not look good, which is why, after weighing the matter, the man decided to try an organ transplant with a genetically modified pig kidney.
“I saw it not only as helping me, but as giving hope to thousands of people who need an organ transplant to survive,” the man says in the press release.
The latest breakthrough was made in 2021, when a genetically modified pig kidney was successfully transplanted into a brain-dead human. Pig hearts have also been transplanted into humans in the past. The first pig heart was transplanted in 2022.