A New Hampshire man fought for a chance to transplant a pork kidney, spent months in a good enough shape to be part of a small pilot study of high experimental treatment.
His effort paid off: Tim Andrews, 66, is just another person who is known to live with a pig kidney. Andrews was released by dialysis, the Massachusetts General Hospital announced on Friday, and so well recovered from the transplant on 25 January that he left the hospital a week later.
“When I woke up in a recovery room, I was a new man,” Andrews told Associated Press.
Andrews surgery comes in a turning point in the search to say whether animal transplants can help alleviate the lack of donated human organs. The first four transplants of pork organs-two hearts and two kidneys are short-lived.
However, the fifth recipient of Ksenotransplants, a woman in Alabama, is not nearly as sick as the previous patient, enhanced the terrain – succeeding for now 2½ months after the transplantation of the pork kidney in Nyu Langon Health in November.
Doctors move from these disposable experiments to more formal studies. While monitoring Andrews’s recovery, the doctors of the mass General Brigham have a permit for our food and medicines to perform two additional transplants in their pilot studies, using pig kidneys for landscaped genes delivered by biotechnological egenesis.
And United Therapeutics, another programmer of pork organs decorated with genes, has just won the approval of the FDA for the first world clinical trial of xenotransplantation. Initially, six patients will receive pork kidneys – and if they are reached for over six months, up to 50 additional patients will receive a transplant.
“This is an untreated territory,” said the massive general Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, who also conducted Andrews’ surgery and the first world transplantation of pork kidney last year. But with lessons from animal research and previous human attempts, he said: “I am very optimistic. And I hope that we will be able to survive survival, survival of the kidney, more than two years.”
Gat: kidney transplanted to a man:
Warning: This story contains graphic pictures | The 62-year-old man with a kidney disease in the final stage became the first man to receive a new genetically modified kidney from the pig. Officials at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston say the patient is recovering well and is expected to be discharged soon.
Scientists genetically change pigs, so their organs are more like human to deal with lack of transplantation. More than 100,000 people are on the US transplant list, most of which need a kidney and thousands wait.
Andrews’ kidneys suddenly failed to do about two years ago, and Concord, NH, grandfather struggled with fatigue and complications with dialysis. He is on the transplant list, but doctors warned that it was a long shot. It can take seven years or more people with the Andrews blood type to find the right kidney. In the meantime, people are slowly getting sick on dialysis-Peta’s survival is about 50 percent of Andrews already had a heart attack.
“I saw my mortality and I was ready to fight,” Andrews said. So he asked a mass general if he could get a kidney pig instead. “I told them.” Everything, I’ll do anything. Give me a list of things you want me to do and I’ll do it. “
Stay a strong, previous recipient of pork kidney advises
The nephrologist of the mass general transplant Dr. Leonardo Riella said Andrews was weak and struggled with diabetes, including slow treatment of diabetics who interfered with walking. He would have to fit more to be a candidate.
Andrews started physical therapy and returned six months later about 30 pounds lighter and “ran down the hall almost”, Riella recalled. “He was just, you know, a different person,” so they started checking that he qualified for a pilot studio.
One big question was the heart condition: the first recipient of the mass General pig had a fundamental heart disease to kill him. But Riella said intense exams showed Andrews’s “heart is in the best possible form.”
Still, Andrews was a little nervous and asked for advice from the only other person who knew what kind of a pig kidney transplantation – patient NYU, Towana Looney.
“We just prayed and talked about how it would be,” Andrews said of their phone calls before and after his transplant. He said Looney advised “to just stay strong and do it.”
Doctors said Andrews’ kidney pig kidney became pink and quickly started producing urine in the operating room, and since then he has normally cleaned waste without signs of rejection. Andrews spent a week after being released at the nearby Boston Hotel for daily reviews, but is expected to return home to New Hampshire soon.
NYU Transplant Surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery said patients like those in Pilot Studio Mass General could be a “sweet spot” for wound xenotransplants – it’s still not too sick of years of dialysis, but it is unlikely to survive long enough for human transplant .
“These are patients where it really makes sense to try something else,” Montgomery said. His hospital is one of the two to be part of the United Therapeutics clinical trial later this year, which will include similar patients.
It is too early to know that Andrews will break through, but if the kidney pig is failing, Riella said she would continue to qualify for the transplantation of people and, now she is considered inactive on the transplant list, she will not lose his “waiting time”, which helps to priority.
Andrews now wants to go back to his old dialysis clinic and “to say to these people that there is hope, because no hope is a good thing,” he said.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the scientific and educational media medical group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.
