Chinese scientists have, for the first time in history, successfully performed a transplant of pig lungs into a human.
The genetically modified lungs were transplanted into a 39 year old patient who had died from a stroke. According to researchers, the transplanted lungs were not immediately rejected by the patient’s immune system and remained functional for nine days.
As a result, scientists successfully carried out the transplantation of pig lungs into the human body, which could be a major step in addressing one of the biggest challenges of xenotransplantation the rejection of transplanted organs by the body.
The scientists used this system as an experiment, but their primary objective was to observe how the human immune system would react to the procedure.
One of the complications of lung transplantation is that lungs are constantly exposed to air and microbes, which can activate the immune system and lead to organ rejection.
According to the scientists, genetic modification helped prevent the rejection of the organ, and CRISPR/Cas9 technology was used for this purpose. This technology prevents the human immune system from identifying the transplanted tissues as foreign.
