A surgeon in Florida successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a human at 28 days, CNN reported.
Dr. Ram Krishnan, who did the surgery for a transplant in early June, was selected to become the first surgeon in the country to attempt the transplant for a very short period of time. His team is backed by the Cleveland Clinic.
The first human kidney from a pig to become attached to a human followed three months of planning before it was needed in a pregnant 17-year-old.
“The uterus, however, has tremendous limitations, so if we want a uterus transplanted to the recipient, we’ll have to wait for a uterus to be grown from the patient’s own cells in vitro. But there are some medical issues related to a uterus, so we’ll try to transplant the pig kidney in the uterus to transplant it to the recipient’s uterus later on,” Krishnan told CNN.
Krishnan’s findings were published in the medical journal The Lancet.
“We worked long, hard nights to make sure that we could do it,” Krishnan told ABC News. “I didn’t want to just put a liver or kidney in the recipient’s body with no way to keep it alive if the liver failed. That would be wrong, just wrong. And I didn’t want to give it up if the heart failed, because then it was too late to bring it back.”
Just a day after the surgery, the report said, the woman tested positive for hepatitis but was otherwise healthy.
