Out of 103,000 people in the United States waiting for a transplant, almost 88,000 individuals on the waiting list need a kidney transplant. These statistics were recently provided through Organ Procurement (OPTN) data.
To further emphasize the urgent need, in contrast, approximately 808,000 individuals in the U.S. have end-stage kidney disease, yet in 2020 only about 26,000 people were recipients of a kidney transplant.
Dr. Robert Montgomery, Director of the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone, acknowledged the national organ shortage.
Dr. Montgomery told the NYU Langone News that a 60-day study that he and his team have just completed has provided hope for the future. The procedure, xenotransplant performed by Dr. Montgomery and his team in July 2023, involves transplanting an animal organ into a human.
The transplant was followed by a two month in-dept study by Dr. Montgomery and his team where they gained insight into the procedure as a potential solution to the critical organ shortage.
The subject was a male age 58 who was on a ventilator. As preplanned with his family, the ventilator was removed in September 2023 and his body returned to his family. According to neurological criteria and prior to the transplant, he was declared dead. Dr. Montgomery further explained that testing with a decedent gives the doctors the opportunity of optimizing the immunosuppressant regimen without risk to a living patient.
About the Transplants
The aforementioned procedure is the fifth xenotransplant that has been performed by the Langone Transplant Institute. Dr. Montgomery performed the first pig transplant into a human in September 2021 followed by another procedure in November 2021. NYU Langone surgeons performed two pig/human heart transplants in 2022.
The GalSafe Pig
Revivicor Inc. engineered the FDA approved GalSafe kidney used in the latest xeno transplant. Previous xenotransplants incorporated about ten modifications where the fifth transplant used one, the engineered GalSafe pig.
A biomolecule called ‘alpha-gal’ is responsible for a human’s rapid pig organ rejection. In addition, as an added precaution, the thymus gland of a pig that is also responsible for instructing the immune system, was bound to the pig kidney to ward off delayed rejection.
July 2023 federal data credits the Transplant Institute as having the highest quality lung and kidney transplant programs in the U.S. In addition, the liver and heart organ transplant programs have the highest survival rates in New York.
Six hundred organ transplants were performed in 2022 according to the Organ Sharing Network. CMS for Medicare has approved Langone’s transplant program. Therefore, the institute has met survival requirements set forth by CMS regulation.
The next step by the team involves analyzing the collected data and expanded testing in order to determine any changes that will inform the clinicians on how to proceed in future studies that will one day will involve humans.
