A kidney transplanted from a pig has worked inside a patient for 271 days \u2013 the longest on record, say US doctors.<\/p>\n
Tim Andrews said the transplant gave him “hope” and spared him months of needing to go to hospital to have his blood filtered by a dialysis machine.<\/p>\n
The team at Mass General Brigham hospital say their work shows pig organs can be used as a “bridge” until a human transplant becomes available.<\/p>\n
But the pig organ eventually failed and was removed so Andrews needed a short bout of dialysis before a donor was found.<\/p>\n
Doctors and scientists are exploring xenotransplantation \u2013 using organs from other species \u2013 due to shortages of organs for transplants.<\/p>\n
In the US, around 100,000 people are waiting for a kidney while only 25,000 transplants occur each year. More than 7,000 people in the UK are on the kidney transplant list. <\/p>\n
Andrews was told it could take seven years to get to the top of the list, but that people live only five years, on average, on dialysis.<\/p>\n
“I had a little bit of a shortage of time\u2026 it becomes very depressing,” he said.<\/p>\n
But he described the idea of a pig transplant as “hope” and the “light at the end of the tunnel”.<\/p>\n
“Hope is the biggest thing, the chance to be free from the [dialysis] machine and live your life.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A kidney transplanted from a pig has worked inside a patient for 271 days \u2013 the longest on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":759087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-759086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/759087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}