• Health Record year in pediatric transplantation in Spain, despite the pandemic

The transplantation of animal organs in humans has been studied for decades and is still far from being a reality.

But scientific advances continue their course and now it has just been announced that

a medical team in the United States successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a brain-dead woman

.

The groundbreaking operation was carried out

in late September by a team of surgeons led by Dr. Robert Montgomery,

from New York University Langone Health Medical Center, who assured that the transplant was "absolutely normal" and worked even better. what they expected.

The pig kidney was implanted in the patient's left thigh

so that the doctors could monitor it and after the intervention, it worked correctly for 54 hours since urine began to flow as soon as the blood flowed through the pig's organ, according to a

The New York Times

newspaper report

.

Dr. Montgomery explained that once it was attached to the patient's blood vessels, who was on a ventilator and had signs of kidney dysfunction,

the transplanted kidney generated the same amount of urine that would have been expected from a human

and, Most importantly, there was not the "immediate rejection" that doctors feared.

A genetically modified pig kidney during the transplant operation.HANDOUTvia REUTERS

Until now, the kidney of a pig could not be used because its cells have a type of sugar that is foreign to the human body and causes the immediate rejection of organs.

But the team of surgeons obtained one from a pig that was genetically modified to eliminate that sugar and prevent an attack on the immune system.

The pioneering transplant was received as

great news by the scientific community

as it represents an important advance in the search for solutions to the problem of organ shortage.

"We are moving in the right direction," said Dr. Andrew Adams of the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.

Currently, almost 107,000 Americans are waiting to receive an organ transplant

, including more than 90,000 who need a kidney, according to data provided by the United Network for Organ Sharing.

The average waiting time for a kidney is currently between three and five years.

It was in the mid-1960s that Dr. James Hardy, a surgeon working at the University of Mississippi Hospital, performed for the first time in history a chimpanzee heart transplant to a 68-year-old man with heart problems that he died 90 minutes after the intervention.

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