Last update:
Tim Andrews put himself in shape and is now free of dialysis and said he woke up a new person in the recovery room.
Tim Andrews, who has had a pork kidney transplant, smiles when he leaves the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. (Image: Photo Ap)
A New Hampshire man fought for the possibility of a pork kidney transplant, spending months in a good way to be part of a small pilot study of a highly experimental treatment.
His effort was worth: Tim Andrews, 66, is only the second person who lives with a pork kidney. Andrews is free of dialysis, the Massachusetts General Hospital announced Friday and recovered so well from the January 25 transplant that left the hospital a week later.
“When I woke up in the recovery room, it was a new man,” Andrews told Associated Press.
Andrews surgery arrives at a turning point in the search to know if animal transplants could help relieve the shortage of donated human organs.
The first four pork organ transplants, two hearts and two kidneys, were short. But the fifth receiver of Xenotransplant, a woman from Alabama, not as sick as previous patients, increased the field, thriving for now 2½ months after a pork kidney transplant in Nyu Langone Health in November.
Doctors are moving from those unique experiments to more formal studies. As they monitor the recovery of Andrews, the doctors of General Mass Brigham have food administration and medicines permission to perform two additional transplants in their pilot study, using pork kidneys edited by genes supplied by the Egénesis de Biotechnology.
And United Therapeutics, another pork organ developer edited by genes, has just obtained the approval of the FDA for the first clinical trial of the world of xenotransplantant. Initially, six patients will receive pork kidneys, and if you are going for more than six months, up to 50 additional patients will receive transplants.
“This is an unknown territory,” said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, from Mass General, who directed Andrews surgery and the world’s first pork kidney transplant last year. But with the lessons of animal research and previous human attempts, he said: “I am very optimistic.
Scientists are genetically altering pigs, so their organs are more human to address the shortage of transplants. More than 100,000 people are on the US transplants list., The majority who need a kidney and thousands die.
Andrews’s kidneys abruptly failed about two years ago, and Concord’s grandfather, New Hampshire, fought with fatigue and dialysis complications. It is in the list of transplants, but doctors warned that it was a remote possibility. You can take seven years or more for people with Andrews’s blood type find a matching kidney. Meanwhile, people get sick slowly with dialysis (five -year survival is approximately 50%) and Andrews had already had a heart attack.
“I’ve seen my mortality and I was ready to fight,” Andrews said. Then he asked Mass General if he could get a pork kidney in his place. “I told them.
‘Anything, I will do anything. You give me a list of things you want me to do and I will ‘”.
Mass General’s transplant nephrologist, Dr. Leonardo Riella, said Andrews was weak and fought with diabetes, including a diabetic ulcer with a slow healing foot that hindered the walk. I would have to get more fit to be a candidate.
Andrews began physiotherapy and returned six months later, about 30 lighter pounds and “running around the hall,” Riella recalled. “It was alone, you know, a different person”, so they began to verify whether I would qualify for the pilot to study.
A great question was the cardiac fitness: the first pork kidney receiver of Mass General had underlying heart disease that killed him. But Riella said intense exams showed that Andrews’s heart was in the best possible way. “
Even so, Andrews was a little nervous and looked for advice from the only other person who knew what a pork kidney transplant was like: the NYU patient, Towana Looney.
“We simply pray together and talk about what it would be like,” Andrews said about his phone calls before and after his transplant. He said Looney advised that “it simply stays strong and that is what I am doing.”
The doctors said that Andrews’s pork kidney became pink and quickly began to produce urine in the operating room, and since then has cleaned the waste normally without signs of rejection. Andrews spent the week after his discharge at a nearby Boston hotel for daily check -ups, but he is expected to return home to New Hampshire soon.
The NYU transplant surgeon, Dr. Robert Montgomery, said that patients such as those of the Mass General Pilot unlikely they survive enough time for a human transplant.
“Those are the patients who really make sense to try something else,” said Montgomery. His hospital is one of the two that will be part of the United Therapeutics clinical trial at the end of this year, which will include similar patients.
It is too early to know how Andrews will go, but if the kidney kidney failed, Riella said he would still qualify for a human transplant and, now considered inactive in the list of transplants, he would not lose his “waiting time” he helps. Determine priority.
Andrews now wants to return to his former dialysis clinic and “tell these people that there is hope, because no hope is not good,” he said.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a FEED -Associated Press Union News Agency)
- Location :
New Hampshire, us
By
