Credit: Xijing Hospital of the Air Force Medical University/Xinhua via Alamy
A lung from a genetically modified pig has been transplanted into a person for the first time1. The recipient, a 39-year-old man in China, was brain dead, but the organ survived for nine days.
At least half a dozen people in the United States and China have received organs from genome-edited pigs, including hearts, kidneys, livers and a thymus. The latest procedure suggests that almost any pig organ could be transplanted into people, researchers say. They hope that the animal organs might one day save the thousands of people who die each year while waiting for a donor organ.
Lungs are the most difficult organ to transplant, says Muhammad Mohiuddin, a surgeon and researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who in 2022 led the first pig–heart transplant into a living person. Lungs have the most blood vessels of any transplantable organ, so they are more prone to attack from the immune system, which can lead to blood clots and tissue damage, says Mohiuddin. “I applaud their effort,” he says: “it’s a first step” towards lung xenotransplantation, the use of organs from other species in humans. US clinical trials for pig livers and pig kidneys were approved this year.
Proof of concept
The transplanted left lung was taken from a pig with six genomic edits that was created by research firm Chengdu Clonorgan Biotechnology in China. This included removing three genes to reduce the risk of the organ triggering an immune response and adding three human genes to protect the organ from rejection. In the proof-of-concept trial, the lung was transplanted on 15 May last year, by researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University in China. Their findings were published this week in Nature Medicine.
The team reports that there were no signs of rejection, infection or graft failure in the first three days after surgery. However, 24 hours after the transplant, they noticed the lung was swelling, and that the tissue was also damaged from going without oxygen for a period of time during the transplant procedure. They also observed damage caused by antibodies attacking the organ on day three and six, but noted that the damage to the lung had reduced on day nine, when the study was stopped at the request of the recipient’s family.