Efforts to transplant animal organs into humans reached a milestone, when researchers in China reported that a patient received a genetically modified pig liver that functioned for 10 days. "This is the first time we tried to unravel whether the pig liver could work well in the human body and … whether it could replace the original human liver in the future," said professor Lin Wang, who led the trial. The organ was placed last year in a 50-year-old man at Xijing hospital in Xi'an who was brain dead, the Guardian reports. The study was published Wednesday in Nature.
Researchers said that they saw no signs of immune rejection or accumulation of inflammation and that blood flow to the organ was good, per CNN. "There was good evidence of compatibility, which is really exciting," said Peter Friend, a professor of transplantation at the University of Oxford. The study wasn't conclusive, however, and the patient's family asked that that the liver be removed. "We could not see whether the pig liver could support a patient with severe liver failure," Wang said. The transplant raises hopes that pig livers could serve as a bridge for patients on waiting lists for a liver, or as a help to liver function while the patient's organ regenerates.
In limited attempts, surgeons in the US and China have placed pig hearts, kidneys, and a thymus gland in patients. Some patients have made recoveries and left the hospital, while others died within a few months—though it's not clear the transplants were the cause. Researchers have had more success transplanting gene-edited pig kidneys and hearts into people than livers, per CNN. Dealing with livers "is so difficult," Wang said. "We all know the function of the liver is so complicated." More than 100,000 people in the US are on organ transplant waiting lists. (More xenotransplantation stories.)
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