About 2 years ago, we shared with you the news that scientists will be able to transplant pig hearts into the human body within 5 years. Scientists have been focusing on the compatibility between the pig and the human body for a long time and continue to conduct various researches, and for the first time in history, an experiment that can give hope to kidney patients has been successfully carried out.
For the first time in history, a pig kidney has been successfully transplanted into a human body, if not a heart. After this transplant, which was completely experimental but ultimately successful, the patient’s body did not reject the kidney and started to produce urine normally.
The disease that caused the patient’s brain death disappeared after the transplant
The transplant recipient was a brain-dead patient due to various kidney problems. For such an extensive experiment, the doctors, who had permission from the patient’s family, connected the pig kidneys to the blood vessels outside the patient’s body for 3 days.
The organ transplant surgeon who conducted the experiment, Dr. Robert Montgomery stated that the results of the tests performed after the kidney transplant have quite normal values. Interestingly, it was observed that the weak kidney disease that the brain-dead patient had suffered from until today returned to normal values after the transplant. So if this experiment had been done before the disease progressed that far, the patient might have a chance to survive.
Montgomery also stated that after the transplant process, the kidneys began to produce urine like normal human kidneys. Of course, it is unknown whether the body will accept the pig kidney in the long term, but Montgomery said that, unlike the experiments in which they transplanted from a pig to another animal, they did not find any traces of the body rejecting the kidney.