According to his family and the hospital where the surgery was done, the first person to receive a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig passed away almost two months after the procedure.
At Massachusetts General Hospital, 62-year-old Richard “Rick” Slayman underwent a transplant in March. The pig kidney, according to surgeons, should last for at least two years.
In a statement, the transplant team at Massachusetts General Hospital expressed their deep sadness over Slayman’s passing and their best wishes to his family. They said they could find no evidence that the transplant caused his death.
The man from Weymouth, Massachusetts, was the first person to receive the treatment while still alive. In the past, donors who were brain-dead have received temporary kidney transplants from pigs. After receiving heart transplants from pigs, two men passed away in a matter of months.
Slayman received a kidney transplant from the hospital in 2018, but when it began to fail last year, he had to return for dialysis. His doctors recommended a kidney transplant from a pig when problems from dialysis became frequent.
Slayman’s family thanked his doctors in a statement.
The statement said, “Our family was able to spend seven additional weeks with Rick because of their amazing efforts leading the xenotransplant, and we will always cherish the memories we made during that time.”
They claimed that Slayman had the procedure done in part to give hope to the thousands of recipients of life-saving transplants.
The statement read, “Rick reached his goal, and his optimism and hope will last forever.”
Using animal tissues, organs, or cells to treat human patients is known as xenotransplantation. Since the human immune system instantly destroyed any foreign animal tissue, such attempts were doomed to failure. Modified pigs with more human-like organs have been used in recent attempts.
The majority of the over 100,000 individuals on the country’s transplant waiting list are kidney patients, and thousands of them pass away each year before their turn comes.