A man with end-stage renal disease who earlier this year became the first human to receive a new kidney from a genetically modified pig has died, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/CrtrU
tl;dr:
“The Mass General transplant team is deeply saddened at the sudden passing of Mr. Rick Slayman,” the hospital said in a statement on Saturday. “We have no indication that it was the result of his recent transplant.” [emphasis added]
also even if it was, could the man survived that long without the kidney?
Likely no. The patient had several other severe health issues, any one of which (or, more likely, a combination of which) caused his death. His new mutant kidney was probably the healthiest thing inside him.
His new mutant kidney was probably the healthiest thing inside him that’s rough
Bingo. Even humans will die soon after Human-Human transplants, too.
Kidney issues cause cardiac issues and vice versa
That’s the problem with using experimental procedures on terminally ill patients. The data is crap because you sont know if the procedure killed them or if they just were never gonna make it. .
True, but there’s not many healthy people lining up to get pig organs implanted so this is realistically the best human data we can get until it’s proven to work.
The data is pretty bad, but it’s most ethical to try on people who don’t have better options
Well, you know it didn’t save them
Although, considering all of the other health problems that this patient had, we don’t know that, if this were his only problem, it wouldn’t have.
In other words: it might have, if not for everything else wrong with this guy.
I guess we found out if it was very immediately killing them, and post-mortem, could probably see (a little bit), how much the kidney was to blame
important sentence:
“We have no indication that it was the result of his recent transplant.”
They tried this with a monkey kidney too. Xeno transplants are hard because of hormones differences (I guess the genetic modification here was supposed to help). We just know so so little in medicine and biology in general.
And we’re going to continue making babysteps towards medicine and biology so long as we’ve got bible thumpers going around shaming people for “playing god” when they turn around telling us that all we need are essential oils and ignore our problems.
