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How Pittsburgh set the stage for recent pig-to-human transplant surgery - TribLIVE
Oct 20, 2021 1 min, 32 secs

A team of surgeons in New York reached a milestone last month in transplant medicine: A kidney from a pig attached to a human patient wasn’t immediately rejected — and the organ appeared to function normally.

The kidney came from a genetically modified pig that is a blood relative of a group of pigs developed by a transplant team at UPMC in the 1990s.

John Fung, the UPMC team performed the first successful animal-to-human transplant in 1992 using a liver from a baboon.

In a telephone interview Wednesday morning, he said that while much still needs to be done to determine the long-term results of the pig-to-human kidney transplant, the success by the team in New York “is very, very exciting.”.

“I’ve been speaking with members of the transplant team in New York so I knew this was coming down the pike,” he said.

“The pigs that were used are from the same blood line as the ones we developed in Pittsburgh because we kind of predicted back then that these genetic modifications would make the barrier risk for rejection (of organs) slower,” he said.

Robert Montgomery, who leads the NYU transplant team, said the fact that the organ functioned outside the body is a strong indication that it will work if one is placed inside a body.

“It was better than I think we even expected,” he said in a New York Times article.

Fung said once the data has been collected and analyzed from the pig-to-human transplant, the next logical step will be to track the long-term success of the surgery.

“I think the next logical step will be to transplant a pig liver inside a human,” he said.

(Robert) Montgomery and his team in New York for moving the field forward.”.

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