Scientists at New York University temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants.
Pigs have been the most recent research focus in the effort to address the organ shortage, but one of the hurdles is that a sugar in pig cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection.
The kidney for this experiment came from a gene-edited animal, engineered to eliminate that sugar and avoid an immune system attack.
Surgeons attached the pig kidney to a pair
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