A pig kidney transplant to a human patient was reported to be successful after it was found to function normally, giving a ray of hope in addressing the lack of human organs for transplant.
In a report from USA Today, the surgery, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was done at the NYU Langone Health.
Surgeons had reportedly transplanted a kidney that was obtained from "a pig genetically engineered to grow an organ unlikely to be rejected by the human body."
The recipient of the pig’s kidney was a person who had suffered brain death, it added.
According to Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who led the procedure, the kidney functioned normally and made urine and the waste product creatinine “almost immediately."
“It was better than I think we even expected,” he said. “It just looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor. A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start. This worked immediately,” he told the New York Times.