This is good news, to be celebrated with caution. The first patient with a CRISPR-edited pig kidney has left the hospital. A little over two weeks have passed since the surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, but according to U.S. press reports, Richard Slayman is well enough to have been discharged. Fingers crossed, then, for this 62-year-old man who, thanks to a xeno-rene, no longer needs dialysis.
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The first paper on a CRISPR xenotransplant is out in the American Journal of Transplantation. It’s about two swine kidneys with 10 modified genes transplanted into a dead brain man as a proof of concept. The surgery was performed on September 30 by Jayme Locke and colleagues from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
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And so it happened. “In a first, surgeons attached a pig kidney to a human, and it worked,” as the New York Times puts it. Data are scarce, however, and all the info we have is from the general media. The kidney came from a GalSafe pig, which is the only one FDA approved so far. But scientists from several companies have already developed pigs much more engineered than that (with three or four porcine genes knocked-out instead of one, and human gene additions). To get an updated picture, we highly recommend this article published in Nature Biotechnology last April.
CRISPeR FRENZY 