Successful Pig Kidney Transplant to Human in China Confirms Possibility of Xenotransplantation

A hospital in China has successfully completed a surgery transplanting a gene-edited pig kidney into a human.

On the 13th, Bloomberg News, citing China's state-run media China Daily, reported that on the 6th, local medical staff at Xijing Hospital, affiliated with the Air Force Military Medical University in Xi'an, China, performed a surgery transplanting a gene-edited pig kidney into a 69-year-old patient. About a week after the transplant surgery, an evaluation of safety showed that the condition of the pig kidney in the patient's body was good. The patient's blood creatinine levels were reported to have returned to normal from the third day after surgery.

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Successful cases of transplanting animal organs into humans are rare worldwide. According to Bloomberg News, there have been only four kidney xenotransplants so far, all performed in the United States. Previously, in March last year, medical staff at Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. performed the world's first transplant of a genetically modified pig kidney into a 62-year-old man suffering from end-stage kidney disease, but the recipient died two months after the surgery.

Professor Duo Kefeng, who performed this transplant surgery, described it as "a groundbreaking case providing a new approach to clinical treatment for patients with end-stage kidney disease," and evaluated that "the feasibility and effectiveness of xenotransplantation have been confirmed."

This is not the first case of xenotransplantation in China. The Hong Kong South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported in May last year that medical staff at Anhui Medical University Hospital in China transplanted a genetically modified pig liver into a 71-year-old male liver cancer patient. This was the world's first transplant of a pig liver into a patient who was not brain dead.

Meanwhile, according to the People's Daily in China, there are 130 million chronic kidney failure patients in China, of whom an estimated 2% are in the end stage. Also, while 300,000 patients in China wait annually for organ transplants, only 20,000 transplant surgeries are performed each year.