Sixty seconds .. on history of pig and xenotransplantation
- Cross-species transplantation (xenotransplantation) offers the prospect of an unlimited supply of organs and cells for clinical transplantation, perhaps minimising waiting lists of patients for transplants.
- Between the 17th and 20th centuries, blood was transfused from various animal species into patients with a variety of pathological conditions. Skin grafts were carried out in the 19th century from a variety of animals, with frogs being the most popular.
- Austro-Hungarian surgeon Emerich Ullmann (1861-1937; originally from Pecs, Hungary), briefly worked with Louis Pasteur in Paris, on rabies antisera. Then in 1902, in Vienna, he carried out the first kidney transplant, in which a dog’s kidney was implanted into another dog’s neck. The kidney lasted for 5 days.
- Following an unsuccessful attempt to transplant a pig kidney into a human patient, in the final stages of CKD, he ceased work in this area.
- The French surgeon Mathieu Jaboulay (1860-1913), also documented kidney transplants from animals to humans. On 24th January, 1906, he transplanted the left kidney of a pig into the left elbow of a 48 year old female suffering from nephrotic syndrome. However, the graft failed because of early vascular thrombosis.
- In the 1920s, YuYu Voronoy advocated the transplantation of slices of chimpanzee testis into aged men whose ‘zest for life’ was deteriorating, believing that the hormones produced by the testis would rejuvenate his patients. Voronoy and team were later (1933-49) to carry out some of the first human-to-human kidney transplants.
- In 1963-1964, when human organs were not available and chronic dialysis was not yet in use, Reemtsma transplanted chimpanzee kidneys into 13 patients, one of whom returned to work for almost 9 months before suddenly dying from what was believed to be an electrolyte disturbance.
- The first heart transplant in a human ever performed was by Hardy in 1964, using a chimpanzee heart, but the patient died within 2 hours. Starzl carried out the first chimpanzee-to-human liver transplantation in 1966; in 1992, he obtained patient survival for 70 days following a baboon liver transplant.
With the advent of genetic engineering and cloning technologies, pigs are currently available with a number of different manipulations that protect their tissues from the human immune response; resulting in increasing pig graft survival in nonhuman primate models.
Genetically modified pigs offer hope of a limitless supply of organs and cells for those in need of a transplant – including millions of people with advanced CKD.
Other resources
This is a good review article: Cooper, 2012
History of renal transplantation
Pig kidney transplant advance – no mention of pig viruses
Last Reviewed on 7 April 2024