New Hampshire man who was ready to fight becomes second known person living with pig kidney
A New Hampshire man fought for the chance at a pig kidney transplant, spending months getting into good enough shape to be part of a small pilot study of a highly experimental treatment.His effort paid off: Tim Andrews, 66, is only the second person known to be living with a pig kidney.Andrews is free from dialysis, Massachusetts General Hospital announced Friday, and recovering so well from the Jan.25 transplant that he left the hospital a week later.“When I woke up in the recovery room, I was a new man,” Andrews told The Associated Press.Andrews’ surgery comes at a turning point in the quest to tell if animal-to-human transplants could help ease the shortage of donated human organs.
The first four pig organ transplants — two hearts and two kidneys — were short-lived.But the fifth xenotransplant recipient, an Alabama woman not nearly as sick as prior patients, boosted the field — thriving for now 2½ months after a pig kidney transplant at NYU Langone Health in November.Doctors are moving from those one-off experiments to more formal studies.
As they monitor Andrews’ recovery, doctors at Mass General Brigham have the Food and Drug Administration permission to perform two additional transplants in their pilot study, using gene-edited pig kidneys supplied by biotech Genesis.And United Therapeutics, another developer of gene-edited pig organs, just won FDA approval for the world’s first clinical trial of xenotransplantation.Initially, six patients will receive pig kidneys — and if they fare well over six months, up to 50 additional patients will receive transplants.“This is uncharted territory,” said Mass General’s Dr.
Tatsuo Kawai, who led both Andrews’ surgery and the world’s first pig kidney transplant last year.But with lessons from animal research and the prior human attempts, he said, “I’m very optimistic.
And hopefully, we can get to survival, kidney survival, for over two years.”Scientists are genetically alteri...