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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
For the first time, a genetically modified pig lung was transplanted
into a brain-dead man
By Jen Christensen, CNN
Updated:
11:00 AM EDT, Mon August 25, 2025
Source: CNN
A genetically modified pig lung was transplanted into a brain-dead man
and functioned for nine days, according to a newly published report.
There has been some recent success transplanting pig kidneys and hearts
into people, but this is believed to be the first attempt to transplant
a pig lung into a human. Doctors hope this could someday be an options
for people in need of organs, but experts say it won’t be any time
soon.
Authors from Guangzhou Medical University First Affiliated Hospital in
Ching didn’t identify the patient in the study, but he’s described
as a 39-year-old man who was declared brain-dead after a brain
hemorrhage. Doctors transplanted a pig lung into his body after getting
consent from the man’s family. The findings were published Monday in
the journal Nature Medicine.
With any human-to-human transplant or animal-to-human transplant –
also known as xenotransplantation – doctors watch carefully for
infection and rejection.
The patient received several medications to reduce the risk of
infection and rejection. The lung itself had also received six gene
edits, and the donor pig was kept in an extremely clean and strictly
controlled area for its entire life.
In the study, the researchers reported that they didn’t see immediate
signs of rejection after the transplant but problems arose after just a
day.
Widespread swelling developed throughout the man’s body as fluid
built up in his tissues, potentially due to a blood flow problem. In
addition to helping a person breathe, the lungs play a role in blood
circulation.
There were some signs of partial recovery just days after the
transplant, but despite all the precautions, doctors saw signs that the
man’s body was starting to reject the organ.
At the request of the man’s family, doctors terminated the
experiment.
“Although this study demonstrates the feasibility of pig-to-human
lung xenotransplantation, substantial challenges relating to organ
rejection and infection remain,” the researchers wrote in the new
study. They concluded that more research is needed before the procedure
could be done again repeated in a clinical trial.
The world has a tremendous need for donated organs. In the US alone in
2023 the waiting list for all organ transplants was twice as long as
the number .
Last year, there were more than in the US, but more than 103,000 people
were on waiting lists. people in the United States die every day
waiting for a transplant, according to the federal Health Resources and
Services Administration, or HRSA.
Pig valves have been transplanted into humans for the past 30 years;
organs are trickier, but doctors have seen limited success with
genetically modified pig hearts and pig kidneys. They’ve also
experimented with a genetically modified pig liver but had less
success, at least so far.
The most success to date has been with a man in Massachusetts, , who is
living with a genetically modified pig kidney that was transplanted at
Massachusetts General Hospital in January.
Experts say there’s a ways to go before pig lung transplants show as
much success.
“Nobody would sign up for a nine-day lung transplant,” said Dr.
Adam Griesemer, a a senior member of the xenotransplantation team for
NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute, who was not involved with the new
research.
Griesemer said transplants of pig lungs into other animal in past
experiments have shown similar results.
“I think it is very important to do these studies since you can’t
assume that the animal models are going to perfectly reflect what
happens in human recipients,” Griesemer said.
The researchers in China said they did the study, in part, because
there is “transformative potential” in xenotransplantation.
, chief of thoracic surgery and director of the , found the research
interesting but added that he thinks pig-to-human lung transplants
won’t be happening any time soon.
“We’ll learn something from this, but I’m not fully convinced
that this really opens up the doors to doing bigger trials, just based
on what we observed here,” he said.
Lungs are much more complicated to transplant than organs like kidneys,
he said.
The lungs play a critical role in blood filtration, temperature
regulation, platelet production, pH balance and immune defense, and
they have metabolic and endocrine functions. And unlike the kidney or
heart, the lungs are exposed to outside elements like viruses and
bacteria when they take in air.
Because they are so large and covered with proteins that aid in immune
defense, even with a lung transplant from another human, it’s
difficult to circumvent the body’s instinct to reject something
foreign, Bharat said.
“That’s a tough problem to solve. We haven’t really solved that,
even in human organs,” he said. “So you are just adding another
layer of complexity with pig antigens that can become another
problem.”
Although the researchers behind the new study suggested that the
man’s body did not show signs of immediate rejection of the pig lung,
but Bharat isn’t so sure after he looked at the X-ray images and CT
images they shared.
“There is a lot of damage,” Bharat said. “I don’t know if I’m
fully convinced that there was no hyper-acute rejection.”
At least where lung transplants are concerned, Bharat thinks, advances
in the use of a human’s own stem cells may be more promising than
transplanting a pig organ.
Griesemer said there is also research under way to use a pig lung as a
scaffold so scientists using stem cell therapy can swap out the pig
cells for human cells.
“In a sense, that would not really be a xenotransplant, because the
cells would be human, but the structure would be from a pig,”
Griesemer said. “So that’s another possibility for how medical
technology might solve this problem for people that need lung
transplant.”
Recent advances in and gene editing, along with a better understanding
of infection control, have led a handful of institutions to
breakthroughs transplanting other pig organs — all key steps that
could one day lead to an alternative organ supply.
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