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Doctors successfully transplanted a genetically edited pig kidney into a man with end-stage disease, a step towards using animal sources to help alleviate critical shortages of organs available for procedures.

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The 62-year-old patient is recovering from the four-hour procedure performed March 16 and is expected to be discharged soon, according to a statement from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The patient, Richard Slayman, had an earlier kidney transplant in 2018 that began failing last year.

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The procedure used Crispr gene-editing technology to adapt the organ for transplantation into a human body, building on previous experimental efforts to implant pig kidneys in the bodies of brain-dead humans. Biotechnology company eGenesis Inc. used Crispr to edit genes in the pig organ to increase the safety of transplantation and removed pig viruses that could have led to rejection.

The animal kidney began functioning almost immediately, prompting those in the operating room to burst into applause, Tatsuo Kawai, an MGH transplant surgeon, said Thursday in a press conference. “These results led us to think about proceeding in ways with transplant candidates who are running out of other options,” Kawai said.

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U.S. regulators authorized the surgery under an expanded access pathway that allows medical procedures that have not been yet cleared when patients have very serious or life-threatening conditions.

The development may lead to help for more than 90,000 patients in the U.S. waiting for kidney transplants. Many of these patients are treated regularly with dialysis, a technology for cleaning the blood of toxins.

While expensive, transplants often result in better outcomes than dialysis for people in the late stages of kidney disease, said Leonardo Riella, MGH’s medical director of kidney transplantation.

“Clearly transplant is a much better in potentially reducing cost in comparison to dialysis, but without organs we cannot do it,” he said in the press conference.

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