{"id":215726,"date":"2025-12-29T04:11:38","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T04:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/215726\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T04:11:38","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T04:11:38","slug":"pig-kidneys-could-solve-donor-shortage-according-to-us-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/215726\/","title":{"rendered":"Pig kidneys could solve donor shortage, according to US trial\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A leading surgeon behind a clinical trial of transplanting pig kidneys into living humans has said they could one day be superior to those from human donors.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU Langone\u2019s Transplant Institute, said the first transplant of the trial had already been carried out, with another expected to take place in January. Six patients are expected to receive the pig organs, which have been gene-edited in 10 places to reduce rejection by the human body.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Should the US Food and Drug Administration give approval, the trial will be expanded to involve 44 further transplants.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">The approach, called xenotransplantation, is aimed at solving the shortage of human organs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Participants in the new trial are either ineligible for human kidney transplantation or on a waiting list for such an organ but thought to be more likely to die, or remain un-transplanted, within five years than receive it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\u201cThe truth is that there\u2019s just never going to be enough human organs,\u201d Dr Montgomery said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">He speaks from experience. He is not only a pioneering surgeon and one of Time magazine\u2019s most influential people of 2025, but he has inherited a heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy, which killed his father and brother.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">After Dr Montgomery experienced seven cardiac arrests \u2014 one resulted in a month-long coma \u2014 he received a heart transplant himself in 2018.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\n            I think everybody really knows that we have a terrible problem in terms of rationing organs, because there\u2019s such a scarcity of supply.\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">\u201cBut unless you\u2019ve walked in the shoes of somebody who\u2019s waiting for a transplant, you don\u2019t really fully understand how unlikely it is that you\u2019re going to receive a transplant in time,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">He has pioneered new approaches to the supply of human organs, including domino-paired kidney transplants.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">In this situation, a living donor whose kidney is incompatible with their expected recipient is matched with another patient, whose own incompatible donor is then matched to another patient and so on, creating a chain of donors and recipients that increases the availability of compatible organs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Dr Montgomery has also been a leader in the use of organs from donors with hepatitis C, treating recipients with medication to clear the infection, and even accepted a hepatitis C\u2013positive heart for his own heart transplant.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">While the idea of xenotransplantation has been around for decades, recent developments have proved pivotal \u2014 including the ability to create gene-edited pigs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">Dr Montgomery carried out the world\u2019s first gene-edited pig-to-human organ transplant in 2021.<\/p>\n<p class=\"contextmenu Body Body\">While the recipient of the kidney was brain dead, Dr Montgomery said it was an important step, showing the organs were not immediately rejected and providing safety data that had opened the door for use in living people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A leading surgeon behind a clinical trial of transplanting pig kidneys into living humans has said they could&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1111,103,61,60,43,1112],"class_list":["post-215726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-court-and-crime","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-politics-and-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}