A New Hampshire man fought for the chance in a pig’s kidney transplant, spending months spending enough enough to be part of a small pilot study of very experimental treatment.
His attempt was paid: Tim Andrews, 66, is only the second person who is known to live with a pig kidney.
Andrews is free from dialysis, Massachusetts General Hospital announced on Friday, and being so well recovered from the January 25 transplant that he left the hospital a week later.
“When I woke up in the recovery room, I was a young man,” Andrews told the Associated Press.
Andrews surgery comes at a turning point in trying to show if animal-inhumane transplants can help relieve the lack of donated human organs.
The first four transplants of the pig organs-two heart and two short-lived kidneys.
But the fifth recipient of xenotransplant, a woman in alabama not as ill as previous patients, increased the field – flowering for now 2½ months after a pork transplant in NYU Langone Health in November.
Doctors are going through those unilateral experiments in more official studies.
While monitoring the recovery of Andrews, doctors in Mass General Bigram have the permission of the food administration and drugs to perform two additional transplants in their pilot study, using pigs edited with the gene supplied by Genesis Botech.
And United Therapeutics, another genera developer edited by genes, just gained the FDA’s approval for the world’s first clinical test of xenotransplantation.
Initially, six patients will take pork kidneys – and if they travel well over six months, up to 50 additional patients will receive transplants.
“This is an unexplored territory,” said Dr. The General’s Tatsuo Kawai, who led both Andrews operations and the world’s first pig kidney transplant last year. But with teaching from animal research and previous human efforts, he said, “I am very optimistic. And hopefully, we can reach survival, survival in the kidneys, for more than two years.”
Scientists are genetically changing pigs, so their organs are more human to address the lack of transplantation. More than 100,000 people are on the US transplant list, most who need a kidney, and thousands die waiting.
Andrews kidney failed suddenly about two years ago, and Concord, New Hampshire, grandfather fought with fatigue and dialysis complications. He is on the transplant list, but doctors warned it was a long shot.
It may take seven years or more for people with the type of blood of Andrews to find a matching kidney.
Meanwhile, people slowly get sick in dialysis-five-year-old is about 50%-and Andrews had already had a heart attack.
“I’ve seen my mortality and have been ready to fight,” Andrews said. So he asked Mass General if he could get a pork kidney in place. “I told them. ‘Thing anything, I’ll do nothing. You give me a list of things you want me to do and I’ll do it. ‘”
Mass transplant nephrologist Dr. Leonardo Riella said Andrews was weak and was fighting with diabetes, including a slow diabetic ulcer that prevented walking.
He will have to achieve more to be a candidate.
Andrews began physical therapy and returned six months later about 30 pounds easier and “running almost in the hallway,” Riella recalled.
“He was right, you know, another person,” so they started checking if he would qualify for the pilot study.
A big question was Fitness Cardiac: The first recipient of General Mass’s pig’s pigs had an underlying heart disease that killed him. But Riella said the intense exams showed that “Andrews’s heart was in the best possible form.”
However, Andrews was a little nervous and sought tips from the only person else who knew what a pork kidney transplant was – NYU patient, Towana Loney.
“We just prayed together and talked what it would be like,” Andrews said about their phone calls before and after his transplantation. He said Looney advised “stay strong and that’s what I’m doing.”
Doctors said Andrews’s pig kidney turned pink and quickly began urine production in the operating room, and since then it has cleaned waste normally without signs of refusal.
Andrews spent the week after his dismissal at a hotel nearby Boston for daily checks, but is expected to return home soon to New Hampshire.
NYU transplant surgeon, Dr. Robert Montgomery said patients like those in the pilot study of General General may be “sweet place” for early xenotransplants – not yet very ill from dialysis years, but are unlikely to survive so long for human transplantation.
“These are patients where it really makes sense for them to try something else,” Montgomery said.
His hospital is one of the two that will be part of the United Therapeutics’ clinical test this year, which will include similar patients.
Too too early to know how Andrews would travel, but if the pig kidney failed, Riella said he would still qualify for human transplant and is now considered inactive on the transplant list, would not lose “time of his “waiting” that helps determine the advantage.
Andrews now wants to return to his old dialysis clinic and “Tell these people that there is hope, because no hope is a good thing,” he said.
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