When doctors need to confirm an Alzheimer's diagnosis, they often turn to a combination of brain imaging and cell analysis. Both have their downsides. The latter involves a lumbar puncture, an invasive and painful procedure that’s more commonly known as a spinal tap. A doctor will insert a needle into the lower back to extract a sample of the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid. A lab technician then tests the sample for signs of progressive nerve cell loss and excessive amyloid and tau protein accumulation. MRI scans are less invasive but they’re often expensive and accessibility is an issue; not every community has access to the technology.
The next best tool for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is a blood test. While some can detect abnormal tau protein counts, they’re less effective at spotting the telltale signs of neurodegeneration. But that could soon change. This week, in the journal Brain, a multinational team made up of researchers from Sweden, Italy, the UK and US detailed a new antibody-based blood test they recently developed. The new test can detect brain-derived tau proteins, which are specific to Alzheimer’s disease. Following a study of 600 patients, the team found their test could reliably distinguish the illness from other neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr. Thomas Karikari, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the co-authors of the study, told The Guardian he hopes the breakthrough could help other researchers design better clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments. “A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and it can improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and selecting participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring,” he said. There’s more work to be done before the test makes its way to your local hospital. To start, the team needs to validate that it works for a wide variety of patients, including those who come from different ethnic backgrounds.
When doctors need to confirm an Alzheimer's diagnosis, they often turn to a combination of brain imaging and cell analysis. Both have their downsides. The latter involves a lumbar puncture, an invasive and painful procedure that’s more commonly known as a spinal tap. A doctor will insert a needle into the lower back to extract a sample of the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid. A lab technician then tests the sample for signs of progressive nerve cell loss and excessive amyloid and tau protein accumulation. MRI scans are less invasive but they’re often expensive and accessibility is an issue; not every community has access to the technology.
The next best tool for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is a blood test. While some can detect abnormal tau protein counts, they’re less effective at spotting the telltale signs of neurodegeneration. But that could soon change. This week, in the journal Brain, a multinational team made up of researchers from Sweden, Italy, the UK and US detailed a new antibody-based blood test they recently developed. The new test can detect brain-derived tau proteins, which are specific to Alzheimer’s disease. Following a study of 600 patients, the team found their test could reliably distinguish the illness from other neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr. Thomas Karikari, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the co-authors of the study, told The Guardian he hopes the breakthrough could help other researchers design better clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments. “A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and it can improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and selecting participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring,” he said. There’s more work to be done before the test makes its way to your local hospital. To start, the team needs to validate that it works for a wide variety of patients, including those who come from different ethnic backgrounds.
Despite being the wealthiest nation on the face of the planet, the United States chronically runs short of transplantable organs. Kidneys are far and away the most sought-after organ for transplantation, followed by livers. While the liver is the only human organ known capable of regenerating itself, if you damage yours badly enough for long enough — as some 30 million Americans have — then the only treatment is a transplant. Assuming you can even acquire one for doctors to stick in you. Every year demand for replacement livers outstrips supply by a scope of tens of thousands.
“Only one-third of those on the liver transplant waiting list will be transplanted, and the demand for livers is projected to increase 23 percent in the next 20 years,” a multidisciplinary team of researchers observed in 2016’s Liver-Regenerative Transplantation: Regrow and Reset. “Exacerbating the organ shortage problem, the donor pool is expected to shrink further because of the obesity epidemic. Liver steatosis [aka fatty liver disease] is increasingly common in donors and is a significant risk factor in liver transplantation.”
To address this critical shortage, the study authors note that doctors have explored a variety of cutting-edge regimens, from cell repopulation and tissue engineering, nanoparticles to genomics, mechanical aids to porcine-derived xenotransplantation, all with varying degrees of success. Cellular repopulation has been used for years, a process that injects healthy liver cells into the patient’s damaged organ through a portal vein where they adhere themselves to the existing cellular scaffolding and grow into new, functional liver tissue.
Fabian Bimmer / reuters
“Creating an immediately available and inexhaustible supply of functioning liver cells from autologous tissue would allow early intervention in patients with hepatic failure and would allow liver cells to be infused over a longer period of time,” the 2016 study’s authors note. “Combined with recent advances in genome-editing technology, such liver cells could be used widely to treat devastating liver-based inborn errors of metabolism and to eliminate the need for a life-long regimen of immunosuppressive drugs and their complications.” The downside to this technique is the pace at which the donor cells proliferate, making it a poor tool against acute liver failure.
Extracellular Vesicle-based therapies, on the other hand, leverage the body’s intracellular communications pathways to deliver drugs with, “high bioavailability, exceptional biocompatibility, and low immunogenicity,” according to 2020’s Extracellular Vesicle-Based Therapeutics: Preclinical and Clinical Investigations. “They provide a means for intercellular communication and the transmission of bioactive compounds to targeted tissues, cells, and organs” including “fibroblasts, neuronal cells, macrophages, and even cancer cells.”
EVs are the postal letters that cells send one another. They come in a variety of sizes from 30 to 1000 nm and have exterior membranes studded with multiple adhesive proteins that grant them entry into any number of different types of cells. Exploiting the biological equivalent to a janitor’s key ring, researchers have begun tucking therapeutic nanoparticles into EVs and using them to discreetly inject treatments into the targeted cells. However, these treatments are still in the experimental stages and are most effective against acute liver failure and inborn metabolic diseases rather than end-stage liver failure.
Mayo Clinic
Mechanical aids, the hepatocytic equivalent to a dialysis machine, like the Mayo Spheroid Reservoir Bioartificial Liver (SRBAL, above) are ideal for treating cases of acute liver failure, able to take over the entirety of the patient’s liver function externally and immediately. However, such procedures are both expensive and temporary. The SRBAL can only support a patient for up to two weeks, making it more suitable for keeping someone alive until a donor can be located rather than as a permanent, pacemaker-like solution.
No matter where the transplanted organ comes from, getting it into the patient is invariably going to involve a significant surgical procedure. However, the Lygenesis company recently unveiled its non-invasive solution: tricking the patient’s body into growing a series of miniature, ectopic liver “organoids” in its own lymphatic system like a crop of blood-scrubbing potatoes.
For those of you who dozed through high school bio, a quick recap of terms. The lymphatic system is a part of the immune system that serves to circulate some 20 liters of lymph throughout your body, absorb excess interstitial fluids back into the bloodstream, and incubate critical lymphocytes like T-cells. Organoids, on the other hand, are biological masses artificially grown from stem cells that perform the same functions as natural organs, but do so ectopically, in that they function in a different part of the body as a regular liver. Blood-scrubbing potatoes are self-explanatory.
“Fundamentally, Lygenesis uses the lymph node, your body's natural bio reactors typically used for T-cells,” company CEO and co-founder Michael Hufford, told Engadget. “We hijacked that same biology, we engraft our therapies into the lymph nodes to grow functioning ectopic organs.”
“We use an outpatient endoscopic ultrasound procedure where we're going down through the mouth of the patient using standard endoscopic equipment,” Hufford continued. “We engraft ourselves there in minutes under light sedation, so it's very low medical risk and also is really quite inexpensive.” He notes that the average cost for a proper, in-hospital liver transplant will set you back around a million dollars. Lygenesis’ outpatient procedure “is billed at a couple of thousand or so,” he said.
More importantly, the Lygenesis technique doesn’t require a full donated liver, or even a large fraction of one. In fact, each donated organ can be split among several dozen recipients. “Using our technology a single donated liver can reach 75 or more patients,” Hofford said. The process of converting a single donated liver into all those engraftable samples takes a team of three technicians more than six hours and 70 steps to complete. The process does not involve any gene manipulation, such as CRISPR editing.
This process is quite necessary as patients cannot donate culturable liver cells to themselves. “Once you have end-stage liver disease, you typically have a very fibrotic liver,” Hofford noted. “It will bleed at the slightest sort of intervention.” Even the simple act of collecting cellular samples can quickly turn deadly if the wrong bit of organ is bisected.
And it’s not only the transplant recipients themselves who are unable to donate. Hofford estimates between 30 and 40 percent of donated livers are too worn to be successfully transplanted. “One of the benefits of our technology is we're using organs that have been donated but will otherwise be discarded,” he said.
Once engrafted into a lymph node, the liver organoid will grow and vascularize over the course of two to three months, until it is large enough to begin supporting the existing liver. Hufford points out that even with end-stage disease, a liver can retain up to 30 percent of its original functionality, so these organoids are designed to augment and support the existing organ rather than replace it outright.
Lygenesis is currently in Phase 2A of the FDA approval process, meaning that a small group of four patients have each received a single engraftment in a lymph node located in their central body cavity near the liver itself (the body has more than 500 lymph nodes and apparently this treatment can technically target any of them). Should this initial test prove successful subsequent study groups will receive increasing numbers of engraftment, up to a half dozen, to help the company and federal regulators figure out the optimal number of organoids to treat the disease.
While the liver’s inherent regenerative capabilities make it an ideal candidate for this procedure, the company is also developing similar treatments for the kidneys, pancreas and thymus gland as well as inborn metabolic liver ailments like maple syrup urine disease. These efforts are all at much earlier points in development than the company’s end stage liver work. “Within the next five years, we would love to see our liver program submitted to the FDA as a new biologic therapy and be commercially available,” Hufford said. “I think that'd be a realistic timeframe.”
Despite being the wealthiest nation on the face of the planet, the United States chronically runs short of transplantable organs. Kidneys are far and away the most sought-after organ for transplantation, followed by livers. While the liver is the only human organ known capable of regenerating itself, if you damage yours badly enough for long enough — as some 30 million Americans have — then the only treatment is a transplant. Assuming you can even acquire one for doctors to stick in you. Every year demand for replacement livers outstrips supply by a scope of tens of thousands.
“Only one-third of those on the liver transplant waiting list will be transplanted, and the demand for livers is projected to increase 23 percent in the next 20 years,” a multidisciplinary team of researchers observed in 2016’s Liver-Regenerative Transplantation: Regrow and Reset. “Exacerbating the organ shortage problem, the donor pool is expected to shrink further because of the obesity epidemic. Liver steatosis [aka fatty liver disease] is increasingly common in donors and is a significant risk factor in liver transplantation.”
To address this critical shortage, the study authors note that doctors have explored a variety of cutting-edge regimens, from cell repopulation and tissue engineering, nanoparticles to genomics, mechanical aids to porcine-derived xenotransplantation, all with varying degrees of success. Cellular repopulation has been used for years, a process that injects healthy liver cells into the patient’s damaged organ through a portal vein where they adhere themselves to the existing cellular scaffolding and grow into new, functional liver tissue.
Fabian Bimmer / reuters
“Creating an immediately available and inexhaustible supply of functioning liver cells from autologous tissue would allow early intervention in patients with hepatic failure and would allow liver cells to be infused over a longer period of time,” the 2016 study’s authors note. “Combined with recent advances in genome-editing technology, such liver cells could be used widely to treat devastating liver-based inborn errors of metabolism and to eliminate the need for a life-long regimen of immunosuppressive drugs and their complications.” The downside to this technique is the pace at which the donor cells proliferate, making it a poor tool against acute liver failure.
Extracellular Vesicle-based therapies, on the other hand, leverage the body’s intracellular communications pathways to deliver drugs with, “high bioavailability, exceptional biocompatibility, and low immunogenicity,” according to 2020’s Extracellular Vesicle-Based Therapeutics: Preclinical and Clinical Investigations. “They provide a means for intercellular communication and the transmission of bioactive compounds to targeted tissues, cells, and organs” including “fibroblasts, neuronal cells, macrophages, and even cancer cells.”
EVs are the postal letters that cells send one another. They come in a variety of sizes from 30 to 1000 nm and have exterior membranes studded with multiple adhesive proteins that grant them entry into any number of different types of cells. Exploiting the biological equivalent to a janitor’s key ring, researchers have begun tucking therapeutic nanoparticles into EVs and using them to discreetly inject treatments into the targeted cells. However, these treatments are still in the experimental stages and are most effective against acute liver failure and inborn metabolic diseases rather than end-stage liver failure.
Mayo Clinic
Mechanical aids, the hepatocytic equivalent to a dialysis machine, like the Mayo Spheroid Reservoir Bioartificial Liver (SRBAL, above) are ideal for treating cases of acute liver failure, able to take over the entirety of the patient’s liver function externally and immediately. However, such procedures are both expensive and temporary. The SRBAL can only support a patient for up to two weeks, making it more suitable for keeping someone alive until a donor can be located rather than as a permanent, pacemaker-like solution.
No matter where the transplanted organ comes from, getting it into the patient is invariably going to involve a significant surgical procedure. However, the Lygenesis company recently unveiled its non-invasive solution: tricking the patient’s body into growing a series of miniature, ectopic liver “organoids” in its own lymphatic system like a crop of blood-scrubbing potatoes.
For those of you who dozed through high school bio, a quick recap of terms. The lymphatic system is a part of the immune system that serves to circulate some 20 liters of lymph throughout your body, absorb excess interstitial fluids back into the bloodstream, and incubate critical lymphocytes like T-cells. Organoids, on the other hand, are biological masses artificially grown from stem cells that perform the same functions as natural organs, but do so ectopically, in that they function in a different part of the body as a regular liver. Blood-scrubbing potatoes are self-explanatory.
“Fundamentally, Lygenesis uses the lymph node, your body's natural bio reactors typically used for T-cells,” company CEO and co-founder Michael Hufford, told Engadget. “We hijacked that same biology, we engraft our therapies into the lymph nodes to grow functioning ectopic organs.”
“We use an outpatient endoscopic ultrasound procedure where we're going down through the mouth of the patient using standard endoscopic equipment,” Hufford continued. “We engraft ourselves there in minutes under light sedation, so it's very low medical risk and also is really quite inexpensive.” He notes that the average cost for a proper, in-hospital liver transplant will set you back around a million dollars. Lygenesis’ outpatient procedure “is billed at a couple of thousand or so,” he said.
More importantly, the Lygenesis technique doesn’t require a full donated liver, or even a large fraction of one. In fact, each donated organ can be split among several dozen recipients. “Using our technology a single donated liver can reach 75 or more patients,” Hofford said. The process of converting a single donated liver into all those engraftable samples takes a team of three technicians more than six hours and 70 steps to complete. The process does not involve any gene manipulation, such as CRISPR editing.
This process is quite necessary as patients cannot donate culturable liver cells to themselves. “Once you have end-stage liver disease, you typically have a very fibrotic liver,” Hofford noted. “It will bleed at the slightest sort of intervention.” Even the simple act of collecting cellular samples can quickly turn deadly if the wrong bit of organ is bisected.
And it’s not only the transplant recipients themselves who are unable to donate. Hofford estimates between 30 and 40 percent of donated livers are too worn to be successfully transplanted. “One of the benefits of our technology is we're using organs that have been donated but will otherwise be discarded,” he said.
Once engrafted into a lymph node, the liver organoid will grow and vascularize over the course of two to three months, until it is large enough to begin supporting the existing liver. Hufford points out that even with end-stage disease, a liver can retain up to 30 percent of its original functionality, so these organoids are designed to augment and support the existing organ rather than replace it outright.
Lygenesis is currently in Phase 2A of the FDA approval process, meaning that a small group of four patients have each received a single engraftment in a lymph node located in their central body cavity near the liver itself (the body has more than 500 lymph nodes and apparently this treatment can technically target any of them). Should this initial test prove successful subsequent study groups will receive increasing numbers of engraftment, up to a half dozen, to help the company and federal regulators figure out the optimal number of organoids to treat the disease.
While the liver’s inherent regenerative capabilities make it an ideal candidate for this procedure, the company is also developing similar treatments for the kidneys, pancreas and thymus gland as well as inborn metabolic liver ailments like maple syrup urine disease. These efforts are all at much earlier points in development than the company’s end stage liver work. “Within the next five years, we would love to see our liver program submitted to the FDA as a new biologic therapy and be commercially available,” Hufford said. “I think that'd be a realistic timeframe.”
More evidence is mounting that virtual reality might relieve pain during surgery. MIT Newsreports that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center researchers in Boston have published a study indicating that patients wearing VR headsets required less anesthetic during hand surgery. While the average conventional patient needed 750.6 milligrams per hour of the sedative propofol, people looking at relaxing VR content (such as meditation, nature scenes and videos) only required 125.3 milligrams. They also recovered earlier, leaving the post-anesthesia unit after 63 minutes on average versus 75 minutes.
The scientists claim VR distracted the patients from pain that would otherwise command their full attention. However, the researchers also admitted that the headset wearers may have gone into the operating room expecting VR to help, potentially skewing the results.
Beth Israel Deaconess' team is planning trials that could rule out this placebo effect, though. One follow-up trial will also gauge the effect of VR on patients receiving hip and knee surgery. Past experiments, such as at St. Jospeph's Hospital in France, have indicated that the technology can help assuage patients.
The allure for healthcare providers is clear. Patients might suffer less and return home sooner. Hospitals, meanwhile, could make the most of their anesthetic supplies, free recovery beds and reduce wait times. What a provider spends on VR headsets could pay for itself if it allows for more patients and higher-quality treatment.
More evidence is mounting that virtual reality might relieve pain during surgery. MIT Newsreports that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center researchers in Boston have published a study indicating that patients wearing VR headsets required less anesthetic during hand surgery. While the average conventional patient needed 750.6 milligrams per hour of the sedative propofol, people looking at relaxing VR content (such as meditation, nature scenes and videos) only required 125.3 milligrams. They also recovered earlier, leaving the post-anesthesia unit after 63 minutes on average versus 75 minutes.
The scientists claim VR distracted the patients from pain that would otherwise command their full attention. However, the researchers also admitted that the headset wearers may have gone into the operating room expecting VR to help, potentially skewing the results.
Beth Israel Deaconess' team is planning trials that could rule out this placebo effect, though. One follow-up trial will also gauge the effect of VR on patients receiving hip and knee surgery. Past experiments, such as at St. Jospeph's Hospital in France, have indicated that the technology can help assuage patients.
The allure for healthcare providers is clear. Patients might suffer less and return home sooner. Hospitals, meanwhile, could make the most of their anesthetic supplies, free recovery beds and reduce wait times. What a provider spends on VR headsets could pay for itself if it allows for more patients and higher-quality treatment.
Remote robotic-assisted surgery is far from new, with various educational and research institutions developing machines doctors can control from other locations over the years. There hasn't been a lot of movement on that front when it comes to endovascular treatments for stroke patients, which is why a team of MIT engineers has been developing a telerobotic system surgeons can use over the past few years. The team, which has published its paper in Science Robotics, has now presented a robotic arm that doctors can control remotely using a modified joystick to treat stroke patients.
That arm has a magnet attached to its wrist, and surgeons can adjust its orientation to guide a magnetic wire through the patient's arteries and vessels in order to remove blood clots in their brain. Similar to in-person procedures, surgeons will have to rely on live imaging to get to the blood clot, except the machine will allow them to treat patients not physically in the room with them.
There's a critical window of time after a stroke's onset during which endovascular treatment should be administered to save a patient's life or to preserve their brain function. Problem is, the procedure is quite complex and takes years to master. It involves guiding a thin wire through vessels and arteries without damaging any of them, after all. Neurosurgeons trained in the procedure are usually found in major hospitals, and patients in remote locations that have to be transported to these larger centers might miss that critical time window. With this machine, surgeons can be anywhere and still perform the procedure. Another upside? It minimizes the doctos' exposure to radiation from X-ray imaging.
During their tests, the MIT engineers only had to train a group of neurosurgeons for an hour to use the machine. By the end of that hour, the surgeons were able to successfully use the machine to remove the fake blood clots in a transparent model with life-size vessels replicating the complex arteries of the brain.
MIT professor and team member Xuanhe Zhao said:
"We imagine, instead of transporting a patient from a rural area to a large city, they could go to a local hospital where nurses could set up this system. A neurosurgeon at a major medical center could watch live imaging of the patient and use the robot to operate in that golden hour. That’s our future dream."
A robot has successfully performed "keyhole" intestinal surgery on pigs without any aid from humans, according to a study from John Hopkins University (published in Science Robotics). What's more, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) handled the tricky procedure "significantly better" than human doctors. The breakthrough marks a significant step towards automated surgery that could one day help "democratize" patient care, the researchers said.
Laparoscopic or keyhole surgery requires surgeons to manipulate and stitch intestines and other organs through tiny incisions, a technique that requires high levels of skill and has little margin for error. The team chose to do "intestinal anastomosis" (joining two ends of an intestine), a particularly challenging keyhole procedure.
Soft tissue surgery in general is hard for robots due to the unpredictability. To deal with that, the STAR robot was equipped with specialized suturing tools and state-of-the-art imaging systems that could deliver extremely accurate visualizations.
John Hopkins
Specifically, it had a "structural light–based three-dimensional endoscope and machine learning–based tracking algorithm" to guide the robots. "We believe an advanced three-dimensional machine vision system is essential in making intelligent surgical robots smarter and safer," said John Hopkins professor Jin Kang. On top of that, STAR is the first robotic system that can "plan, adapt and execute a surgical plan in soft tissue with minimal human intervention," said first author Hamed Saeidi. Using all that technology, the STAR robot successfully performed the procedure in four animals
Laparoscopic surgery is minimally invasive compared to regular surgery, which helps ensure better patient outcomes. However, because it takes so long to master, there's a relatively small pool of doctors able to do it.
"Robotic anastomosis is one way to ensure that surgical tasks that require high precision and repeatability can be performed with more accuracy and precision in every patient independent of surgeon skill," said senior author Axel Krieger from John Hopkins. "We hypothesize that this will result in a democratized surgical approach to patient care with more predictable and consistent patient outcomes."
A robot has successfully performed "keyhole" intestinal surgery on pigs without any aid from humans, according to a study from John Hopkins University (published in Science Robotics). What's more, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) handled the tricky procedure "significantly better" than human doctors. The breakthrough marks a significant step towards automated surgery that could one day help "democratize" patient care, the researchers said.
Laparoscopic or keyhole surgery requires surgeons to manipulate and stitch intestines and other organs through tiny incisions, a technique that requires high levels of skill and has little margin for error. The team chose to do "intestinal anastomosis" (joining two ends of an intestine), a particularly challenging keyhole procedure.
Soft tissue surgery in general is hard for robots due to the unpredictability. To deal with that, the STAR robot was equipped with specialized suturing tools and state-of-the-art imaging systems that could deliver extremely accurate visualizations.
John Hopkins
Specifically, it had a "structural light–based three-dimensional endoscope and machine learning–based tracking algorithm" to guide the robots. "We believe an advanced three-dimensional machine vision system is essential in making intelligent surgical robots smarter and safer," said John Hopkins professor Jin Kang. On top of that, STAR is the first robotic system that can "plan, adapt and execute a surgical plan in soft tissue with minimal human intervention," said first author Hamed Saeidi. Using all that technology, the STAR robot successfully performed the procedure in four animals
Laparoscopic surgery is minimally invasive compared to regular surgery, which helps ensure better patient outcomes. However, because it takes so long to master, there's a relatively small pool of doctors able to do it.
"Robotic anastomosis is one way to ensure that surgical tasks that require high precision and repeatability can be performed with more accuracy and precision in every patient independent of surgeon skill," said senior author Axel Krieger from John Hopkins. "We hypothesize that this will result in a democratized surgical approach to patient care with more predictable and consistent patient outcomes."
A group of surgeons from the University of Alabama at Birmingham has proven that it's possible to genetically alter a pig so that its kidneys can be used on human transplant patients. The doctors have transplanted kidneys from a genetically altered pig into the abdomen of a brain-dead man, and as The New York Times has reported, the procedure was described in a paper published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
According to the doctors, the kidneys from the pig started producing urine as soon as 23 minutes after the procedure and continued to do so for three days. The patient's kidneys were fully removed, and his body didn't show signs of rejecting the transplanted organs. This is the latest in a series of developments wherein organs from genetically altered pigs were successfully transplanted into humans. In late 2021, NYU Langone Health doctors attached a pig kidney onto the blood vessels of a brain-dead patient's upper leg. And, just a few days ago, doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine transplanted a pig's heart into a live patient as part of an experimental procedure.
The UAB surgeons performed the procedure with consent from the family of the recipient, James Parsons, who wanted to be an organ donor. They're now naming this type of study after him. While the recipient was brain dead in this case, it's a big step toward a clinical trial involving live patients that they're hoping would start later this year. Dr. Jayme Locke, the team's lead surgeon, said this wasn't a one-off experiment, and that the hope is to "advance the field to help... patients." The doctor who serves as director to UAB's Incompatible Kidney Transplant Program added: "What a wonderful day it will be when I can walk into clinic and know I have a kidney for everyone waiting to see me."
Based on data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, there are currently 90,272 people on the waiting list for kidney transplant. In addition, around 3,000 new patients are added to the waiting list for the organ each month. Dr. Locke said "kidney failure is refractory, severe and impactful" and that "it needs a radical solution." She hopes to be able to offer life-saving pig kidney transplants to patients within the next five years.