In a groundbreaking development, researchers have tested a pioneering technique in pigs aimed at repairing organs prior to transplantation. This innovation comes at a time when 19 individuals die each year in Europe due to a shortage of available organs. In Spain alone, nearly 5,000 patients are on waiting lists for transplants.
The recent success involved the first transplantation of porcine kidneys that had been integrated with human cells. The authors of this study, led by Nuria Montserrat from the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), successfully created numerous human kidney organoids, which are miniature versions of kidneys. These organoids were combined with pig kidneys outside the body and subsequently reintroduced into the same animals.
Approximately 20,000 human kidney organoids were inserted into each of the seven pig kidneys used in the experiment. These organs remained viable outside the body thanks to perfusion machines. The primary goal of this method is to regenerate or repair organs before they are transplanted, which could potentially increase the number of viable organs and shorten patient waiting times.
According to the researchers, the transplanted kidneys functioned normally, and the human organoids remained active without causing any damage after 48 hours. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Iván Fernández Vega, a professor of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Oviedo, noted, “This technique could extend the lifespan of grafts and decrease the number of discarded organs.” However, he cautioned that these outcomes have yet to be experimentally proven, and there is no current evidence that the organoids can participate in repair or connect to the necessary afferent and efferent arterioles to restore filtering function.
Rafael Matesanz, founder of the National Transplant Organization, emphasized the significance of this study, stating, “The greatest value of this article lies in the systematic and scalable method it describes for producing significant quantities of these human kidney organoids affordably, utilizing microaggregation and genetic engineering techniques. The procedure outlined here could be highly beneficial for future research.”
