Vita gazette – Another first in America. Scientists transplanted a pig kidney into the body of a brain-dead man. The transplanted pig kidney has been alive for more than a month. The same team had previously transplanted a genetically engineered pig kidney into a human.

A pig kidney was transplanted into a human in an infrequent operation at NYU Langone Health in New York City, USA. A pig kidney transplanted by surgeons into a brain-dead man continued to function normally for over a month.

This was a critical step for the operations the team intended to try on living patients. Director of the organ transplant institute at New York University Langone, Dr Robert Montgomery, in his statement, said, “Will this organ work like a human organ? It looks like that for now,” he said.

“It looks even better than a human kidney,” Montgomery added. He explained that a man who died on July 14 had his kidneys replaced with a single kidney from a genetically modified pig, which immediately started producing urine. The country has over 100,000 patients on the transplant list, and thousands die yearly while waiting for a kidney.

The possibility that a pig kidney could one day alleviate the shortage of transplantable organs convinced the family of 57-year-old Maurice Miller of New York to donate his body for the experiment.

“I struggled with this,” his sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, said. I think my brother would like that too. So I offered them to my brother. It will be in the medical books and will live on forever.”

Animal-to-human transplant attempts have failed for decades because people’s immune systems do not accept foreign tissue. Now researchers are using genetically modified pigs to make their organs better fit the human body.