The world’s first case of a gene-edited pig lung successfully transplanted into a brain-dead human has been reported by a Chinese team in a paper published online Tuesday in the British journal Nature Medicine. The results are expected to help ease the shortage of lung transplant donors, which international experts have hailed as a“Milestone” in the field.
The research team, led by HE Jianxing, a professor at the first hospital affiliated to the Guangzhou Medical University, transplanted a gene-edited left lung from a Bama Xiang pig into a brain-dead man, mimicking a common single-lung transplant. The donor pig has been genetically edited in six ways to reduce the immune risk of its organs being transplanted into humans. After operation, the monitoring data of respiration, blood and imaging showed that the function of ventilation and gas exchange of the transplanted lung was maintained for 9 days without hyperacute rejection, synchronous aetiological surveillance also showed no evidence of active infection.
“At present, the global demand for organ transplantation is increasing day by day, and Xenotransplantation is considered to be a promising solution to the donor shortage,” he jianxing told Xinhua News Agency, “This achievement marks a critical step forward in the field of xenogeneic lung transplantation.”
He said the next steps would be to further optimize gene editing strategies and anti-rejection treatment regimens, extend the survival and functional maintenance time of transplanted organs, and apply the team’s self-developed regardless technology to xenograft lung transplantation trials, in order to reduce the injury of mechanical ventilation to the donor lung and promote the clinical application of lung xenotransplantation.
According to the research team, this research program strictly follows the relevant national laws and regulations and ethical guidelines, and has passed the review and supervision of hospital ethics committees and other institutions. The subjects had severe head injuries and were confirmed to be brain dead by multiple independent evaluations. His family agreed to participate in the research for free out of a desire to support medical progress. The study ended at the family’s request on the ninth day.
Xenotransplantation of animal organs to human beings is the frontier of global medical research, and international experts highly evaluated the research results. “Previous xenotransplantation trials have been limited to kidneys, hearts and livers,” said Beatrice Dominguez-hill, director of the National Organization for transplantation in Spain. Compared with them, xenogeneic lung transplantation faces a greater challenge. “The lungs are particularly vulnerable because of their delicate balance, the amount of blood they receive and their constant exposure to outside air,” she said, the Chinese team’s work is“A milestone” in the field.