A man who was the first to receive a genetically modified pig kidney transplant has died just two months after undergoing the procedure, his family and the hospital that performed the surgery said on May 11.
Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital conducted the procedure on 62-year-old Richard “Rick” Slayman of Weymouth, Massachusetts in March. At the time, surgeons were confident the pig kidney would last for at least two years.
In a statement by at Massachusetts General Hospital, the transplant team offered condolences to Mr Slayman’s family and expressed sadness at his passing.
The hospital also said that nothing suggests the man’s death was caused by the transplant.
The procedure was the first to have been performed on a living person. Prior to this, pig kidneys had been temporarily transplanted into brain-dead patients.
Separately, two men at the University of Maryland received heart transplants from pigs in 2023, but both died under two months.
Mr Slayman had a previous kidney transplant at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 2018, but he had to go back on dialysis last year, after the transplant showed signs of failure.
His ordeal continued beyond that when complications arose as a result of the dialysis, which led doctors to suggesting a pig kidney transplant as an option.
Mr Slayman’s family issued a statement, which was published on Massachusetts General Hospital’s website:
In medical science, the procedure of “xenotransplantation” aims at using cell tissue or organs from animals to cure human patients.
These efforts, however, were bound for failure due to the human immune system rejecting, and subsequently destroying foreign animal tissue, which led to a series of controversial procedures involving genetic modification of animals’ organs in an attempt to make them more human-like.
More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list for a transplant, most of them kidney patients.
