A 62-year-old man from Weymouth, Massachusetts, has become the first person in the world to receive a successful transplant of a genetically edited pig kidney.
Richard “Rick” Slayman underwent the four-hour procedure on Saturday at Massachusetts General Hospital. The hospital announced Wednesday that Slayman is recovering well and is expected to be discharged soon.
Slayman, who is Black, has been living with end-stage kidney disease as a result of having Type 2 diabetes and hypertension for many years. He previously received a human kidney transplant from a deceased donor in December 2018 at Massachusetts General Hospital, but that kidney started to fail in 2023.
“I again trusted my care team at MGH to meet my goals of not just improving my quality of life but extending it,” Slayman said in a statement. “My nephrologist, Dr. Winfred Williams and the Transplant Center team suggested a pig kidney transplant, carefully explaining the pros and cons of this procedure. I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive.”
Williams credited his patient's courageousness in being a trailblazer, and called the transplant “a true milestone in the field of transplantation.”
“It also represents a potential breakthrough in solving one of the more intractable problems in our field, that being unequal access for ethnic minority patients to the opportunity for kidney transplants due to the extreme donor organ shortage and other system-based barriers,” Williams said. “This health disparity has been the target of many national policy initiatives for over 30 years, with only limited success.”
The kidney came from a pig that was genetically edited with CRISPR technology, which allows detailed editing of DNA, at eGenesis of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company removed harmful pig genes and added certain human genes to improve the organ's compatibility with a human body. Certain viruses common to pigs that could be a risk to humans were also inactivated before the transplant.
The procedure was performed under a compassionate use protocol granted by the Food and Drug Administration, which allows the use of experimental treatments for patients with a life-threatening conditions who have no better option.
Dr. Leonardo Riella, the medical director for kidney transplantation at MGH, led a group of physicians in applying for the compassionate use exception, which was approved by the FDA in late February.
“At MGH alone, there are over 1,400 patients on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Some of these patients will unfortunately die or get too sick to be transplanted due to the long waiting time on dialysis,” said Riella. “I am firmly convinced that xenotransplantation represents a promising solution to the organ shortage crisis.”
