World's first successful pig-to-human liver transplant

A genome-edited pig liver has been successfully transplanted into a human recipient for the first time.

A 71-year-old man with advanced liver cancer received the genome-edited pig liver on 17 May 2024 at the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, China.

Seven days after the operation, a representative from the University told the South China Morning Post '...the patient was able to walk freely, no hyper-acute or acute rejection reactions were found, the coagulation system was not impaired, and liver function had returned to normal'.

Ethical committees in China approved the xenotransplantation surgery for the patient, after it was determined that the patient's left lobe of the liver was unable to function sufficiently on its own and that conventional therapies had proven ineffective.

During the surgery, the tumour in the patient's right liver was removed, and the genome-edited pig liver was transplanted into the space that separates the liver from the right kidney. Prior to surgery, ten genome alterations were introduced to the pig to prevent organ rejection.

The liver continuously makes a golden yellow fluid called bile, which then passes from the liver via the bile ducts to the small intestine where if helps to digest food. The surgeons reported that the surgery proceeded smoothly, and the liver functioned normally by producing bile immediately.

'Currently, the transplanted pig liver secretes about 200ml of golden bile every day,' said the hospital's director Professor Sun Beicheng, who led the transplant team, '… the blood flow in the hepatic artery, portal vein and hepatic vein of the transplanted pig liver is completely normal'.

This surgery follows the transplantation of a genome-edited pig kidney into a patient with end-stage kidney disease at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (see BioNews 1232) and the transplantation of genome-edited pig hearts into two patients with terminal heart disease at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore (see BioNews 1128 and 1209). However, all three patients died within eight weeks of their surgeries.

Previously, a team from the University of Pennsylvania connected a genome-edited pig liver to a brain-dead man using an external machine with tubes to carry blood, which they hoped would offer a temporary solution to patients with acute liver failure (see BioNews 1223).