The transplantation of animal organs in humans is held studying for decades and is still far from being a reality. But scientific advances follow their course and now just announced that a medical team in the United States managed to successfully transplant the kidney from a pork to a woman with brain death.
The pioneer operation was held at the end of September by a team of surgeons headed by Dr. Robert Montgomery, from the Langone Health Medical Center of New York University, who said that the transplant was "absolutely normal" and ran even better than What they expected.
The pork kidney was implanted on the left thigh of the patient so that the doctors could monitor it and after the intervention, it worked correctly for 54 hours since the urine began to sprout as soon as the blood flowed through the porcine organ, according to a Report of the New York Times newspaper.
Dr. Montgomery explained that once he was attached to the blood vessels of the patient, he was connected to an artificial respirator and had signs of kidney dysfunction, the transplanted kidney generated the same amount of urine that would have been expected of a human one and, What is more important, there was no "immediate rejection" that physicians feared.
Until now, the kidney of a pork had not been used because his cells have a type of sugar that is alien to the human body and causes immediate rejection of organs. But the team of surgeons obtained one of a porcine that was genetically modified to eliminate that sugar and avoid an attack on the immune system.
The pioneer transplant was received as great news by the scientific community since it is an important progress in the search for solutions to the problem of organ scarcity. "We are advancing in the right direction," said Dr. Andrew Adams, from the School of Medicine at the University of Minnesota.
At present, almost 107,000 Americans are waiting to receive an organ transplant, including more than 90,000 that need a kidney, according to data provided by the United Network for Organ Sharing Organization. The average waiting time of a kidney is at this time between three and five years.
It was in the mid-60's when Dr. James Hardy, a surgeon who worked at the University Hospital of Mississippi, made for the first time in history the heart transplant of a chimpanzee to a 68-year-old man with heart problems that He died 90 minutes after the intervention.
Date Of Update: 21 October 2021, 00:42
