by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
The first man to receive a genetically modified pig kidney died last month, just two months after the transplant.
The transplant was done in March (2024), with much fanfare over being the first person to receive a pig kidney.
In a first, doctors at Mass General transplanted a pig kidney into a living patient
Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital on Thursday said they have transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a human living with kidney disease, the first such procedure in the world.
The patient, 62-year-old Richard Slayman of Weymouth, is recovering well and will be discharged from the hospital soon, according to his doctors.
The surgery is a milestone in the field known as xenotransplantation — when an organ from one species is transplanted into another — and is seen as a potential solution to the worldwide shortage of human organs for patients who need transplants.
Nationally, more than 100,000 people are on a waitlist for an organ transplant, and only some of the patients who could benefit from new kidneys actually receive them. Others endure long-term dialysis treatment. While on dialysis, patients may become too sick to qualify for transplants.
“Picture a different narrative,” said Dr. Leonardo Riella, Mass General’s medical director of kidney transplantation, “one where healthy young kidneys are readily available for transplantation in individuals with advanced kidney disease. Today, we are offering a glimmer of hope to many of these patients.”
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Riella became emotional describing the years of work that led to the complex four-hour operation on March 16.
This latest advance builds on decades of research. The world’s first-ever kidney transplant was performed 70 years ago at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Mass General’s sister institution.
Mass General worked with a Cambridge-based company called eGenesis, which raises Yucatan minipigs at farms in the Midwest. One of the pigs was brought to Massachusetts, where its kidney was removed and sent to the hospital by ambulance, in a box, encased in ice.
As soon as the pig kidney was transplanted, it started working. Everyone in the operating room burst into applause, said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, a transplant surgeon.
“The kidney pinked up immediately and started to make urine,” Kawai said. “It was truly the most beautiful kidney I have ever seen.”
Kawai said he hopes the organ will function for at least two years.. (Full article. Emphasis mine)
But it did not function for “at least two years” as had been hoped, and the patient with Stage 5 kidney disease died in less than two months after the transplant.
The first person to receive a genetically modified pig kidney transplant has died
Richard “Rick” Slayman, the first human to receive a genetically modified pig kidney transplant, has died almost two months after the procedure.
Slayman, who had end-stage kidney disease, underwent the transplant in March at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston at age 62.
“The Mass General transplant team is deeply saddened at the sudden passing of Mr. Rick Slayman,” read the hospital statement.
“Mr. Slayman will forever be seen as a beacon of hope to countless transplant patients worldwide and we are deeply grateful for his trust and willingness to advance the field of xenotransplantation.” (Source. Emphasis mine.)
Many people with Stage 5 kidney disease can live for years while waiting for a human kidney transplant, using dialysis and careful treatment. (Source.)
The second person to receive a pig kidney transplant was Lisa Pisano in April (2024). Again, this was announced in the media as a huge scientific breakthrough.
A woman with failing kidneys receives genetically modified pig organs
Lisa Pisano was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone Health, hooked up to beeping monitors and an array of tubes. Her surgical wounds were still healing, and she looked tired. But the 54-year-old New Jersey woman said she hasn’t felt this good in years.
“I’m feeling better and better and better every day,” said Pisano, 54, of Cookstown, N.J. “I got somewhat of me back. Not there yet. But I’m getting there.”
Ten days earlier, Pisano became the second living person in the world to get a kidney from a genetically modified pig transplanted into her body to replace her own failing organs, her doctors announced Wednesday.
A Massachusetts man was the first to get a pig kidney last month.
Pisano also got a thymus gland from the same genetically engineered pig to help prevent her body from rejecting the kidney, as well as a pump to shore up her failing heart.
Pisano’s transplant is the latest development in the fast-moving effort to use genetically modified pigs to solve the persistent shortage of organs for transplants. More than 103,000 people are currently on the waiting list for organs. About 17 die every day because they can’t get one.
“We’re in a new universe in transplantation,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who runs the NYU Langone Transplant Institute where the operation was performed. “This would be a sustainable, unlimited source of organs. This would be transformative.” (Source. Emphasis mine.)
But 47 days later they had to remove the pig kidney in order to keep her alive.
Transplant patient stable and on dialysis after pig organ removed due to ‘unique challenges’ with heart, kidney health
A genetically engineered pig kidney has been removed from a transplant patient after it started losing function, according to a statement on Friday from NYU Langone Health. The patient, 54-year-old Lisa Pisano of New Jersey, is stable and has started dialysis, her doctors said.
Pisano first received a mechanical heart pump, called an LVAD, on April 4 and then, on April 12, received a kidney and thymus gland from a gene-edited pig.
Her case is the first reported organ transplant in a person with a mechanical heart pump, NYU Langone said, and it was the second known transplant of a gene-edited pig kidney into a living recipient and the first transplanted along with the thymus.
The kidney had to be removed due “unique challenges in managing both her cardiovascular health and kidney function” 47 days after the transplant, NYU Langone Health said.
There were multiple episodes where “the blood pressure she could generate from the left ventricular assist device (LVAD) was not adequate to provide optimal perfusion to the kidney, causing cumulative reduction in her kidney function,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, in the statement.
“On balance, the kidney was no longer contributing enough to justify continuing the immunosuppression regimen.” (Source.)
So were these first two cases of humans receiving a genetically modified pig kidney a success, or a failure?
The answer to that question depends upon one’s perspective, and what kind of outcomes one is expecting from the huge amount of money that is being invested to research “xenotransplantation”.
For these first two patients human lab rats, it can hardly be called a “success”, because neither person derived any benefit from the experiments.
But for those doing the research, the fact that the patients did not die immediately on the operating table, it was a success, because this has never been done before.
Now I realize that the argument that will be put forth that the reason why this was a scientific “success” is because there were co-factors involved that can be claimed to have prevented the pig kidneys to last longer, especially with the second patient who also had heart issues.
The family of the first man will of course agree with this line of thinking, because they just lost a loved one who didn’t even last 2 months, when they were told he should last “at least” two years.
They will be led to believe he died for the sake of “science” so others will benefit, and therefore making his sudden death have some kind of positive meaning.
However, that is a statement of faith, and not a scientific one. And remember, the goal of the medical researchers is to scale this procedure to hundreds of thousands of people who are currently waiting for an organ transplant.
The millions of people who currently have diseased organs are primarily the result of trusting in modern medicine to begin with, especially vaccines. So transplanting these diseased organs with organs from animals, is a HUGE business opportunity.
What will be the benchmark for the FDA to give the approval to start scaling this procedure? A person who lives 3 months after getting a monkey kidney, 6 months, or ??
The FDA has a horrible history of serving Big Pharma rather than the public, and rushing approval of novel new products that have never been tested for long-term effects on the population, or even short-term alleged “benefits” that they try to justify are better than the long list of side effects they always have to publish on these new medical products.
My guess is that the approval of this procedure will be forthcoming soon, based on all the money that is being spent to genetically modify all these pigs that soon need to be sold to turn a profit.
How genetically modified pigs could end the shortage of organs for transplants
It’s a crisp, clear winter day as I drive down a winding two-lane road through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwest Virginia and turn onto an unmarked gravel driveway.
At the end of the drive, I meet David Ayares, who runs Revivicor Inc., a biotech company based in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Ayares has invited me to be the first journalist to tour the company’s research farm, which is on the forefront of trying to realize a long-sought goal: using cloned farm animals to provide kidneys, hearts, livers and other organs to save thousands of people who need transplants.
“It’s exciting. We’ve been working on this for more than 20 years. And it’s no longer a science fiction experiment,” Ayares says. “It’s actually a reality.”
The experiments hold promise for alleviating the chronic shortage of organs for transplantation. But the research is also stirring concerns about the ethics of using farm animals for their organs and the risks of spreading animal viruses to people.
Ayares asks me not to disclose the exact location of Revivicor’s farm because of security concerns. (Source. Emphasis mine.)
This sounds a lot like the $billions that have been spent on AI for the past 2 decades on fully autonomous self-driving cars, which years later we still do not have, in spite of the techno-prophecies of Big Tech billionaires like Elon Musk.
Is it possible that it actually is still science fiction that will never work in the real world, the one that God created?
The burden of proof lies with the believers, and the techno-prophets, and of course most all, those who continue to fund them.
20 years is apparently not long enough yet to have people finally call out the false prophets and stop funding them, because the money keeps flowing into this research to try and make science fiction “real.”
The False Claims of Genetically Modified Organisms
LOS ANGELES CA – MAY 24: Protesters rallied in the streets against the Monsanto corporation. The company is accused of genetically modifying foods unsafely. May 24 2014 in Los Angeles California.
Those employed by biotech like to point to the number of years we have had genetically modified crops in the market place now, since the 1990s.
They try to convince the public that genetically modifying something improves that organism, and moves it up higher into the evolutionary chain.
But there is not one single GMO crop on the market that has been modified genetically to become a new, or different organism. All the genetic manipulation is done within the original organism.
So for example, corn has been modified to be resistant to certain herbicides that kill plants, so that you can spray these poisonous chemicals on living plants like corn, and it will not kill the plant.
But nobody has modified, for example, a variety of corn that can grow as another plant, like a watermelon or some other organism.
That’s because it cannot be done.
This thinking and belief system is based on the belief in Darwinian evolutionary biology, which is not actually science at all, but just a belief system.
Is corn better today as a result of altering its genetic makeup? Or did the corn just adapt to be able to resist poisons? The main herbicide that GMO crops resist is glyphosate, which is now known to cause cancer in humans.
In these GM pigs that they have been working on for 20 years now, they have “modified” them to grow smaller organs that will fit inside humans, because most of the organs in pigs are too large to fit into humans.
Is this a benefit to the pig species??
No, of course not. All the current GM products in the market have not benefited the species it modified, but made it weaker so it could adapt and survive the poisons of the mad scientists.
The REAL science that has developed in the past couple of decades is in the field of epi-genetics, which shows how wonderfully created living organisms are, by having the ability to actually adapt and heal from environmental poisons and toxins.
Please review this article I published last year:
Epigenetics Exposes Darwinian Biology as a Religion – Your DNA Does NOT Determine Your Health!
Excerpt:
Darwinian biology has shaped the field of “science” for nearly two centuries now. However, Darwin’s theories of life and origins have undergone many revisions and updates over the years as scientific discovery brings to light new truths that challenge many of Darwin’s presuppositions.
DNA, for example, is a system of classification that was unknown during Darwin’s time, and many of the tenets of DNA have presented problems for Darwin’s theories.
In recent years, the whole field of “epigenetics” has proven that we are not the sum total of our “DNA blueprint.” In fact, the growing field of epigenetics completely contradicts the tenets of Darwinian biology according to biophysicist Dr. Cornelius G. Hunter.
Cornelius G. Hunter is a graduate of the University of Illinois where he earned a Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology. He is Adjunct Professor at Biola University and author of the award-winning book: “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil.”
I encourage everyone to watch this video by Dr. Hunter on DNA methylation, which is just over 35 minutes long. This is a very important truth to understand, because there is a lot of false information going around in the Alternative Health media right now claiming that because the COVID-19 shots “alter one’s DNA,” that they cannot be healed from the damage, and that people are being turned into “transhumans” as a result, and are no longer “homo sapiens.”
This is totally false, and is spreading unnecessary fear. The field of epigenetics shows us that our bodies did not evolve out of random chance, but that they were wonderfully designed with mechanisms to turn off “bad genes,” and to even develop “good genes” that can be passed on to future generations.
A study published in Biophysical Journal in 2019 out of NYU revealed that “a team of scientists has identified how damaged DNA molecules are repaired inside the human genome, a discovery that offers new insights into how the body works to ensure its health and how it responds to diseases that stem from impaired DNA.”
They stated that “the human genome experiences about a thousand DNA damage events every day, which can occur naturally or due to the external factors such as chemicals or UV radiation (e.g. sunlight).”
In fact, if you search through PubMed for the term “DNA repair”, you will get over 100,000 results in the peer-reviewed medical literature. (Full article.)
Here’s a tip I am going to pass on to our readers, that I use in viewing my newsfeed every day.
When you see some headline that reports some major technological breakthrough that is presented as fact, click through and look to see if there is any actual evidence that the so-called technological breakthrough actually exists and is being used every day in the REAL WORLD.
In almost every case you will probably find only hype, like an experiment or trial that produced some desired results in a controlled environment like a laboratory, but which is not yet used in the REAL WORLD where it actually has to work to be truly “successful.”
For example, I clicked on one this week that had this headline on an Alternative News site:
ROBO-DOC World’s first AI hospital unveiled in China with robot doctors who ‘can treat 3,000 patients A DAY & will save millions’
Having earned my living from technology for the past 25 years or so, I knew this could not possibly be true, and so I clicked through to see what the actual evidence was that they were presenting to make this claim. I suspected that there was none, other than some experiments, and that because a lot of money was involved, they were probably prophesying about what they BELIEVED it would do in the future.
And of course, my suspicions were correct.
Dubbed “Agent Hospital”, the virtual facility will have the potential to save “millions” through its autonomous interaction.
Developed by researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing, the AI hospital is so advanced that it already aims to be operational by the second half of 2024.
Six months of research and development means the hospital is nearing readiness for practical application, where it is set to transform the way doctors diagnose and treat patients.
Research team leader of the Agent Hospital, Liu Yang, said the AI hospital will bring immense benefits to both medical professionals and the general public, Global Times report.
Thanks to its simulated environment and ability to autonomously evolve, AI doctors will be able to treat up to 10,000 patients within a matter of days. (Source. Emphasis mine.)
I wonder if the people in the Alternative Media who every day post such science fiction articles like this will actually track this, and do a follow-up in the future to see if these prophecies will come true?
It is one thing to make an AI robot do some expected action in a “simulated environment” where the researchers control all the variables, but it is a whole different matter to put that into practice in a REAL WORLD scenario, where things in a hospital or surgical ward will never be able to be fully simulated.
But when so much money is involved to develop these technological toys, they MUST publish something to satisfy their investors.
It is all about keeping the revenue coming, and if some people are foolish enough to volunteer and become living lab rats to see if it actually works and they end up dying, it is all part of the business plan and the “cost of doing business.”
And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.”
And it was so.
God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.
And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:24-25)
Related:
The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain
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