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Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant
- Waterluvian 1y ago“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and think about how the problem is becoming less and less about “how do we do the science and the engineering?” And more about “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?”
- signa11 1y agofwiw, biological heart valves, as opposed to metallic valves, are already quite commonly used today. biological ones are typically made from either cows, or pigs (bovine, porcine respectively). but this is on another level altogether.
- philiplu 1y agoI had heart surgery 2 months ago to repair my mitral valve. In the lead-up to that, I had to make a decision what to do if it turned out replacement was needed instead of repair. Choices were metallic valves requiring me to be on warfarin the rest of my life or pig-derived valves. I chose the latter, mostly to avoid warfarin for life, but also because my surgeon was a PhD for work on creating biological-derived valves that didn’t trigger the immune system. Just mind-blowing what can be done. But I’m glad repair and not replacement worked out - and I now have GoreTex fibers attached to my valve.
- ACCount37 1y agoGoreTex being the brand of a material that was put into your heart sure sounds amusing.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoAt heart, he's a GoreTex™ guy. I'll just get my coat...
- philiplu 1y agoI’ll have to remember that one
- ggm 1y ago> I'll just get my coat And what fabric is that coat made of?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoSheepskin (the “I’ll get my coat” reference is from The Register).
- mkl 1y agohttps://theregister.com https://theregister.com? It's much older than that.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI am not surprised, but that's where I learned it.
- wombatpm 1y agoPig and cow valves will calcify and fail eventually. But it’s a slow process so you have time to plan and make decisions for replacement. Mechanical values are great until one day the clicking sound stops and you need to get to a hospital ASAP. Back in the 90’s there were a series of values where the flipping plate shattered-sending shrapnel into the heart and beyond. Typical failure mode is stuck open which is survivable. Stuck closed is very bad.
- 0x1ceb00da 1y agoBut why cows and pigs and not chimps?
- padjo 1y agoPresumably because we already farm pigs and cows so there’s a supply chain and the ethics are ok in most people’s heads.
- signa11 1y agomost likely because their (heart) valve anatomy is similar to humans ? this is just a guess btw.
- thyristan 1y agoSize. Pig hearts are the same size as human hearts, cow hearts are larger, so easier to cut up for parts. Chimp hearts are usually smaller. Also, the risk of transmitting zoonosis is larger in primates than in other mammals, because with humans being primates as well, more viruses/prions/fungi might be infectious to both.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 1y agoMeanwhile we can’t figure out how to provide a basic level of housing and healthcare to everyone.
- badpun 1y agoThe US can't, but humanity as a whole can. Finland has both, for example.
- onraglanroad 1y agoThose things have been figured out, you're just choosing not to implement them (you generally, not you specifically).
- ekianjo 1y agoProvide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of debt
- nolroz 1y agoActually tax the rich?
- dmitrygr 1y agoInsane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of under $2000. And what then?
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoSpend the money on things of actual value rather than distributing it equally among a group of people who will inevitably just spend it on an iPhone?
- paulcole 1y agoYou can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once. It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
- ofalkaed 1y agoI think Alan Kay deserves the credit for the tablet. We have vague allusions to tablet like things before Kay but it was Kay who really came up with concept.
- lloeki 1y agoDoes he? It seems to be mostly keyboard operated, and references to any stylus interaction seem to be retconed, let alone direct touch ones. My search only finds modern claims that he's the true tablet inventor and tablets are touch this and stylus that, but these poison results about any possible original reference of that interaction model having been conceived at the time.
- iberator 1y agoWhat tablet are you talking about?!
- varispeed 1y ago> “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?” Progress, invention, is part of being human, so this is natural and normal thing that these thing happen. You can stop, marvel, and then go improve upon your own niche.
- ACCount37 1y agoEh, "figuring out how to deal with it" is the easy part. The hard part is first making it work, and then proving its effectiveness, scaling it and improving it. Medical advancements in particular are notorious for having a hideously long lead time. This here is an experimental procedure that, if all goes well, will only start becoming commonplace by year 2035. It's not guaranteed to all go well. You'd think there would be a massive push for new medical technologies that have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and you'd be wrong. Healthcare is where innovation goes to die. Most companies that attempt to develop this kind of bleeding edge treatment crash and burn either before or shortly after seeing the first results. Just the cost of early testing of a new treatment option is enough to bankrupt many.
- webnrrd2k 1y agoRe: “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?” part of your post... I think that came to prominence when cheap, effective birth control became available. I think it was about the first time that the common people could decide to make major alterations in how their bodies function. That debate continue in the current fight about trans rights. As science and medicine progress, what was once considered solely god-given, or exclusively biologically determined, will be for people to decide for themselves, the decision made between them and their doctors.
- firesteelrain 1y agoNext is Old Man’s War style bodies
- pazimzadeh 1y agoIt really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most successful organs for transplantation, even in allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that they are working well in xeno as well. Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot. Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them work. My mom worked with eGenesis on pig xenotransplantation, particularly lung. Here are some links if you'd like to donate to the International Xenotransplantation Association: https://donate.tts.org/agnes/ https://donate.tts.org/agnes/ https://tts.org/74-ixa/889-ixa-in-memoriam-agnes-marie-azimzadeh https://tts.org/74-ixa/889-ixa-in-memoriam-agnes-marie-azimz...
- derektank 1y agoThere have already been a couple of attempted heart xenotransplants? Lawrence Faucette being the most recent patient that I've read about.
- pazimzadeh 1y agoyep, but they didn't last as long. six weeks max I think?
- magicalhippo 1y agoA family member needed a kidney transplant in the early 60s. This was in the UK where the first successful transplant was in 1959, so just a few years earlier. Thanks to a kid on a motorcycle she got a kidney just in the nick of time. She was in her early 20s and was told she could expect a few years. Because of that she never had kids. Her donated kidney served her well and she lived a quite normal life. She passed when it finally gave up when she was close to 70. So those "few years" turned into almost 50. Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course. She always wondered if that was the reason it held out so long.
- isatty 1y ago
- tw04 1y agoAnd yet while (legitimate) science can universally agree continuing to burn fossil fuels will cause unimaginable chaos for planet earth, half the planet doesn't seem to care about the impending collapse. So while in my personal vacuum this is awesome, when I stop to consider the situation for 30 seconds I can only think: huh, we might have been able to find a new cure for humanity that isn't going to matter when having "a profession" (like doctor) is no longer relevant to our inevitable hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
- ipaddr 1y agoLegitimate science doesn't concluded unimaginable chaos from continuing to burn fossil fuels that's what influencers or movies or tiktok reels present because they are part of the attention economy where scaring you is profitable. Besides hunter/gatherers need medicine men who understand the old ways.
- Manuel_D 1y agoMost experts don't predict the collapse of industrialized society. Higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and more energetic weather events will cause damage and make life difficult for decent chunks of the population especially those in less developed areas that are both hotter and more poorly equipped to cope with climate change. But I'm not aware of a consensus or even a plurality among climate scientists that industrialized society is going to collapse even in the more pessimistic predictions. I'm not sure how Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the company building these pig kidneys is located, becomes a hunter-gatherer society on account of climate change.
- jondiggsit 1y agoAnd people skiing down Mt. Everest. I always like to think about progress and our current reality in comparison to Star Trek….
- BrtByte 1y agoWe're deep into the part of the sci-fi timeline where the tech works, and now the real challenge is cultural, ethical, and existential
- amelius 1y agoWe've invented social media, but democracy wasn't ready for it.
- globular-toast 1y ago> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. If this is Star Trek then I suppose it's a good example of "be careful what you wish for"...
- latexr 1y ago> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoPeople keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThe states were listening to people through their TVs in the 1940s?
- ants_everywhere 1y agoThey were listening to people through their wall art. Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0]. The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time. At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is. [0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoNot "just", the inspiration came from many angles: Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, Spanish repression of POUM, Wartime Britain (where the shape of the TVs come from) and multiple other dystopian novels. People seems to forget that Orwell was a anti-Stalinist socialist.
- worldsavior 1y agoSci-Fi movies aren't that far from reality. It was just a matter of time.
- justinclift 1y agoSeems like we'd want to be careful about the one(s) we're picking though. Sci-Fi movies don't tend to be all happy, happy, fun and joy for everyone in them. o_O
- worldsavior 1y agoUnfortunately not everyone is careful.
- notmyjob 1y agoThe “pigmen” as you insensitively refer to them aren’t necessarily seniors. Organ failure affects men of all ages and the patients themselves are not to blame, often they have terrible support structures surrounding them and other factors beyond their control. You can be optimistic and compassionate simultaneously.
- dreamcompiler 1y ago> “Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal Replacing human heart valves with pig valves has been a thing at least as far back as the 1970s with decade-ish survival rates. Granted TFA is about a whole organ -- not just a piece of tissue -- but xenotransplantation per se is not new.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SapporoChris 1y agoKeep in mind the amazing thing is the survival of having the transplant in addition to kidney failure. People have been living up to five years without kidneys by relying on dialysis.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoDialysis is hell. I had a friend that chose to die, after several months on a home dialysis machine.
- quasarj 1y agoThat's rough, I'm sorry for your loss. I've been on dialysis for 5 years now (in-center, I couldn't do home for.. reasons). In the beginning I was considering giving up, but it did finally get somewhat better, and I'm fairly well adjusted now. I mean, it still sucks (especially losing about 5 hours 3 days a week), but I'm able to not think about it when I'm not there, at least.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoDamn. Sorry to aggravate. I sincerely wish you well.
- basisword 1y ago>> Dialysis is hell. I've seen this sentiment before but I've been unable to find an explanation why. Searching around it's noted as relatively painless. Can anyone explain why it's so difficult?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI have never experienced it, myself, but have seen several close friends deal with it. They always come back wiped out, and sick. Usually, it’s a temporary thing; meant to keep you going, until a full cure (like a transplant) can be effected. My friend made his decision, because a transplant was not an option. He would need to live like that, for the rest of his life. I have a couple of other acquaintances, that got transplants, and were able to go past dialysis.
- nothrowaways 1y agoIt would be interesting what the genetically modified pig looks like.
- pmccrory 1y agosome say it looks like a small human boy
- NathanaelRea 1y agoPorco Rosso
- dbancajas 1y agoGhibli! I didn't expect someone would make this comment!
- ACCount37 1y agoExactly like a pig.
- makeitdouble 1y agoThey have nothing special visually. https://www.kgri.keio.ac.jp/en/research-frontiers/papers/2020-4.html https://www.kgri.keio.ac.jp/en/research-frontiers/papers/202... There are talks to breed them smaller for better handling, as they need to live inside the regulated facility. Having a human size animal roaming around is physically complicated to deal with.
- will_pseudonym 1y agoPig-human organ transplants make me think of The Onion series, Porkin' Across America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwQns6vGfj4&list=PL4NL9i-Fu15jdlr2KQf_lyhXl5f0PFnzF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwQns6vGfj4&list=PL4NL9i-Fu1...
- StephenAmar 1y agoSo I'm not alone who knows about this series.
- c0balt 1y agoThis was not what I expected but thank you for sharing. The onion does not cease to amaze me in eccentric productions
- abxyz 1y agowell, that was horrifying. I’m getting a “Do Not Transplant Pig Organs” tattoo urgently.
- parpfish 1y agoI was just thinking about heart transplants and how they’re treated as commonplace now, but they are nuts when you think about them. You can hook up the nerve wires and blood pipes from one body into the heart from another body and it works? Just thinking about the simple physical connections would make me nervous. Why isn’t there blood just leaking out in your body? Why isn’t that other heart sliding out of place while you move around?
- didgeoridoo 1y agoBlood pipes yes, nerves no. Transplanted hearts are de-enervated.
- amarant 1y agoHeart surgeons are straight up deleting the equivalent of dead code produced by evolution. Heart surgeons are superheroes.
- 6SixTy 1y agoFun fact: the nerves between the brain and heart are never reattached. A heart already has all of the facilities to keep working all by itself. Even weirder is that an adult kidney transplanted into a child will actually shrink to fit.
- krackers 1y agoBut presumably the nerves between the brain and heart exist for a reason. What functionality do you lose by not reattaching them? Do things like "heart beating faster when nervous" depend on this nerve signaling, or is it done via other chemical signaling.
- daedrdev 1y agoReading up on this there is some chemical signaling from the blood, but the brain is not controlling the rate of the new heart
- _heimdall 1y agoI have always wondered what decision I would make facing such a health concern. > Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a “fantastic long-term outcome”, he adds. I am surprised by this being considered a long-term outcome though. Going through the high risk of a kidney transplant, immunosuppression required, risk of using a pig kidney in general, etc seems like a lot if the hope is for 12 months as a long-term unlikelihood.
- quasarj 1y agoI've been on dialysis for 5 years now... which means when I eventually get listed for transplant, I'll be at the top of the list, because nobody survives 5 years...
- CommenterPerson 1y agoMy thoughts with you wish you the best. Curious why you aren't already on a waiting list for a transplant?
- quasarj 1y agoThe rules are very strict, primarily with respect to weight. That is, was (and still am) fat, and that's a no-no. I've lost 120 pounds so far, with at least 10 more to go before I will finally be (possibly) approved!
- cogman10 1y agoAnd this is why this is so exciting. The rules are so strict because kidney supply is extremely limited and they want to maximize the life of the kidney as much as possible. Having a ready supply of pig kidneys would be fantastic. All the sudden it wouldn't matter as much that you are a bad candidate, you might end up simply cycling through pig kidneys more frequently.
- TMWNN 1y agoThis may offer some hope: Thomas Yuen lived for 42 years on dialysis. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Yuen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Yuen>
- catchcatchcatch 1y ago[dead]
- catchcatchcatch 1y ago[dead]
- analog8374 1y agoIs he full of tubes?
- projektfu 1y agoWe all are...
- analog8374 1y agoYou know what I mean. A person hooked up to a machine might not even need a kidney.
- LarsDu88 1y agoI remember interviewing for a bioinformatics role at a certain San Diego company 8 years ago and being told by the staff they were working on humanizing pig kidneys. I thought it was a fucking insane idea and wanted to leave immediately. Turns out I am a fool.
- Invictus0 1y agoDoes anyone know why it's so easy to get kidney transplants in China?
- quasarj 1y agoThat's a (bad) joke, right?
- RossBencina 1y agoNot sure this is any more surprising than a human surviving with a Chimpanzee kidney transplant. https://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html https://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html
- denismi 1y agoIt is fucking wild that we need to resort to putting pig kidneys into humans to squeeze out a few more months of life, while tens of millions of perfectly good human organs are burned or left to rot in the ground each year.
- downboots 1y agopig of Theseus
- adamredwoods 1y agoRichard Slayman was a pioneer. He made an amazing decision, to see if it could be done. This was hard work done through eGenesis, and the steps to get to this point is quite interesting. >> First, the donors were often created on a commercial pig breed whose heart and kidney sizes are too large for human application. Although elimination of growth hormone receptor gene expression could reduce organ sizes, it comes with other undesired biological consequences. Second, the donors were designed for testing in OWMs. They lacked the α-Gal (galactose-α-1,3-galactose) or the α-Gal and Sd(a) (Sia-α2.3-[GalNAc-β1.4]Gal-β1.4-GlcNAc) glycans but expressed the Neu5Gc (N-glycolylneuraminic acid) glycan to match with Neu5Gc expression in OWMs. However, in vitro analysis suggests that a human-compatible porcine donor should ideally have all three glycans eliminated to match with the absence of the three glycans in humans. Although renal grafts derived from the porcine donors lacking these three glycans and carrying various human transgenes have been tested in OWMs, graft survival was short8 or not all human transgenes were expressed. Third, the donors carried porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV) sequences in their genome, which present a zoonotic risk, as PERV transmission to human cells in culture and their integration into the human genome have been demonstrated. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06594-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06594-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Slayman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Slayman
- projektfu 1y agoOWM is old-world monkey, for those who don't bio.
- j_timberlake 1y agoTransplanted kidneys get rejected by the recipient's immune system eventually, you'd really need to clone the kidney from the individual's DNA to solve the rejection problem. There's also been some success with integrating the DNA from the kidney donor (a human) into the recipient's bone marrow to stop the rejection process, but I hear it can be a brutal procedure in which the original bone marrow must be destroyed using chemotherapy or radiation. https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/video-eliminating-the-need-for-lifelong-immunosuppressive-medications-for-transplant-patients/ https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/video-eliminat... https://www.immunofree.com/how-it-works/ https://www.immunofree.com/how-it-works/ If I were a patient, I'd probably want a pig kidney now and really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning is a thing.
- goku12 1y ago> and really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning is a thing. There was another technology under development, colloquially called the 'ghost heart' [1]. It uses a dead heart that's similar to a human's, most likely a pig's heart (I speculate that an unused human heart can also be used). They remove all the cells from the heart using a soap-like substance to obtain a ghostly white colored scaffolding of a heart (probably made of collagen). Then they use the recipient's own stem cells to grow heart muscles, blood vessels, etc on the scaffold. The process to get it to work like a human heart seems complicated, but doable. As you can guess, this heart is fully immunocompatible with the patient and doesn't require immunosuppressants like after a regular transplant. I imagine that this can eventually be replicated for any organ and that the improvement in the patient's quality of life it will bring is unthinkable in the current state of affairs. I'm not sure about the progress and current state of this technology, but several articles do turn up on searching. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/01/health/ghost-heart-life-itself-wellness/ https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/01/health/ghost-heart-life-i...
- hinkley 1y agoAny time I haven’t heard about a tech for ten years I assume it didn’t work. I think I first heard of this stuff around ten years ago. At the time I think they were focused on kidneys. But those have a lot of complex plumbing. As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context, or not so close to the problem they can’t see it, I would assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for bypasses and aneurism repair operations. Ghost intestines for reconstruction surgery for people with cancer or massive internal trauma. You’d have a simpler organ to reproduce, but in the artery case you’d likely have to also work turnaround time. Heart failure can be slow, but bypass surgery is often scheduled as either urgent or emergency (I just had a convo with a man who wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital after an angiogram showed he was one stairwell away from a fatal heart attack). But not having to harvest material from the thigh before surgery begins should shorten the surgery and reduce complications. You can have as much artery as you want for the surgery. You could have spares.
- AfterHIA 1y agoWe're rooting for you pal! Stay strong.
- dumbfounder 1y agoHow is the pig doing?
- weregiraffe 1y agoPorkly
- mjlee 1y agoIt just needed some oinkment.
- matonski 1y ago"This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person." Not quite the way I thought it should be phrased...
- goku12 1y agoA bit of medical and historical context seems to invert its interpretation entirely. For example Louis Washkansky, the recipient of the first human transplant (performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa) lived for only 18 days before passing away from pneumonia. But nobody considers that historical fact as a negative when thinking about heart transplants these days. In comparison, this statement about the pig kidney is actually very exciting. It means that the xenotransplantation technology is progressing rapidly and will soon become widely available. They seem to have overcome most of the serious difficulties in the process.
- BrtByte 1y agoWhat seems like a small step now often ends up being the foundation for something revolutionary a decade later
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> It means that the xenotransplantation technology is progressing rapidly and will soon become widely available It also validates the platform. If it can last for 6 months, chances are there isn’t some catastrophic failure mode that would keep it from lasting for 6 or 60 years.
- Arch-TK 1y agoI think the person you replied to was objecting to the fact that the wording makes it sound like we're using humans as vessels for extending the life of pig organs outside of pigs. Not necessarily that 6 months is a short period of time.
- goku12 1y agoThat's an interesting way to interpret it! I see what you mean, but I still can't see myself interpreting that headline in that way. Does it really give that vibe?
- ashu1461 1y agoThis surpasses the previous record of 4 months https://www.science.org/content/article/longest-human-transplant-pig-kidney-fails https://www.science.org/content/article/longest-human-transp... Pretty amazing tech tbh
- lulavcret 1y ago[dead]
- lulavcret 1y ago[flagged]
- agnosticmantis 1y agoHow about the donor piggy though? If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)
- october8140 1y agoThe donor pig is turned into bacon. Normally the liver goes in the trash.
- goku12 1y agoAsking out of ignorance. Why is the liver thrown out? Isn't it edible too?
- Maxion 1y agoWho would eat it these days? The same with e.g. sheepskins. The labor to process them in western countries is so high so they generally just get thrown away.
- gus_massa 1y agoI like cow liver, it's nasty to handle while raw, but I like it cooked in thin beefs with fried onion. I also like chicken liver. It's small enough to be cooked whole. I'd like to try pig liver.
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- BrtByte 1y agoThat's genuinely impressive. Six months without dialysis after a xenotransplant is no small milestone, especially considering how many hurdles this field has faced over the years. The level of genetic modification involved shows how far biotech has come. Still, it's hard not to wonder about the long game. Immunosuppression, organ longevity, possible unforeseen complications - all big unknowns
- 55555 1y agoI can't read the full article -- what happened with the other two recipients? Science is amazing!
- lwarfield 1y agoI ran into this guy nere Interlaken 2 days ago! Had a nice long talk at the post office over how he was going to present this in Geneva. I heard that this is result is with little or no rejection drugs as well!
- ChaoPrayaWave 1y agoMedical history has seen many "miracles." Hopefully, this time, it will become something more people can replicate and learn from, rather than just a flashy headline.
- simianparrot 1y agoIs he healthy? How much immunotherapy, if any, is he on? Alive is a low bar.
- grantseltzer 1y agoAlive is a very high bar considering the alternative.
- wosined 1y agoCatgirls when?
- wolfgangbabad 1y agoI thought AI will solve all our problems.
- queenss90 1y ago[flagged]
- nntwozz 1y agoIf this works, does the reverse also work?
- sgt 1y agoYes, pig scientists are working on this very problem right now. It gets almost zero attention from human scientists, though.
- kypro 1y agoWhat we really need to work out is how we can incubate humans outside of the womb so we can create brain-dead humans for organ harvesting. Would be both more reliable and more humane than this. Plus you could harvest the heart, liver, etc at the same time. While this is great news, my understanding is that kidneys donors are in larger supply because often family members can give one of theres. This obviously isn't the case for organs like hearts and livers.
- watusername 1y agoI assume that you are being sarcastic and referencing The Island movie?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dcanelhas 1y agoI wonder what the prognosis was right after the operation. The article makes it sound a bit like this outcome was totally unexpected. Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe there's more to diabetes than just a new pancreas. Interesting development, in any case. Thanks for sharing.
- cogman10 1y agoI think the major worry is that the body rejects the transplant. If that happens, things can turn really bad really fast. The body will attack the kidney and completely wreck it. They'd probably need surgery to remove it. He'd probably need to go on dialysis if that were to happen. How long he'd survive IDK. I think I've read that people survive around 2 years on dialysis. > Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe there's more to diabetes than just a new pancreas. It can be. That was the first developed insulin. I believe it's completely synthetic at this point.
- dudeinjapan 1y ago...still alive but has developed an overwhelming urge to forage for truffles.
- vstm 1y agoNew side hustle unlocked
- The_President 1y agoNews headline in the not so distant future: “Man Suffers Unfortunate Loss From Ex Wife, Shows Up at ER with Horse”
- renshijian 1y ago[flagged]
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- oksurewhynot 1y agoDoes this mean you can catch pig kidney diseases (they specifically mention turning of a few retroviruses)? I'm assuming pig kidneys are immune to certain human diseases and vice versa. Kind of wild that you have a single organ running an entirely different mammalian OS distro but it is similar enough that it Just Works.