Medical Organizations in Wisconsin Excited About Genetically Modified Animal Organs in Humans

Thursday, May 9th, 2024 -- 9:00 AM

(Courtney Everett, Wisconsin Public Radio) For more than a decade, 62-year-old Richard Slayman lived with end-stage kidney failure.

According to Courtney Everett with the Wisconsin Public Radio, on April 3, he left a Boston hospital free from the burden of dialysis appointments all because of a pig. Slayman is the first living human to receive a transplant of a genetically modified pig kidney.

The experimental surgery was a global first, according to Massachusetts General Hospital.  The milestone transplant excites Dr. Anna Gaddy of the Medical College of Wisconsin and Dr. Didier Mandelbrot of UW Health who work with patients living with chronic kidney disease.

Both kidney specialists recently told WPR’s “The Morning Show” that using animal organs for human transplant would mean organs are more readily available in Wisconsin.

According to the National Kidney Foundation of Wisconsin, more than 1,200 people in the state are waiting for kidney transplants. “The burden of chronic kidney disease in the United States is just enormous and the vast majority of people with chronic kidney disease don’t know that they have it,” Gaddy said.

Mandebrot oversees the UW Health Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation program and said transplanting animal organs into humans, also known as xenotransplantation, is a concept that dates back 50 years ago.

“The size of the pig’s kidney is very similar to the size of human kidneys,” Mandelbrot said. He said a team of researchers developed the genetically modified pig transplant.

The team includes David Aufhauser and Dixon B. Kaufman of the UW Health Transplant Center and Dhanansayan Shanmuganayagam of the UW Center for Biomedical Swine Research and Innovation.

Mandebrot said scientists removed 69 genes from the donor pig to prevent the transfer of swine viruses. “One of the main concerns over the years is that potentially a virus found in pigs could be transplanted along with those organs and then become dangerous to humans,” Mandelbrot said.

According to Gaddy, ethical concerns with using animals as organ donors is a “gray area,” and the medical community should be careful with how this method is developed moving forward.

“We don’t have data for how this organ is going to perform longitudinally. We know that while pigs have a quicker life cycle, they also don’t live as long as humans,” Gaddy said. Mandelbrot agreed, with one additional thought.

“There’s pig farms already. The world already consumes many pigs,” Mandebrot said. “So the idea of making pig farms of genetically modified pigs for the purpose of saving lives and doing transplants is much more readily acceptable by society.”

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