BALTIMORE — Baltimore could become the place where we put an end to the shortage of organ donors. That’s the plan for two doctors at Johns Hopkins who just got $21.4 million for further research into using animal organs.
It's a two year study that at the end, if successful, will enable the FDA to approve clinical trials in humans of more advanced and more likely-to-be-successful transplants of pig kidneys when human organs aren’t available or feasible.
Its called xenotransplantation, which is animal organs that are transplanted into humans.
"This is science, but it's extremely important for the patient drive, we spent a lot of time lot of effort for the past 20 years, now it is time to do, as I said, a definitive clinical study,” said Dr. Kazuhiko Yamada, Professor of Department of Surgery, Transplant Division at Johns Hopkins.
With exciting advancements in genetic engineering of pigs as potential donors, Johns Hopkins doctors are going to study pig kidneys in their transplant models for the next couple of years.
"The people have been wondering about the possibility of transplanting animal organs for decades and it's a running joke that the future will never arrive, I think it's pretty clear that that future is here,” said Dr. Andrew Cameron, Surgeon in Chief and Director of Department of Surgery at Johns Hopkins.
To put it into perspective, Cameron says there are 100,000 Americans on a transplant waitlist with 80,000 of them waiting on a kidney.
"In our community of Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, we have 2,000 patients within 10 miles of the hospital waiting for a kidney transplant,” Cameron.
Cameron says the pig kidneys they’re testing in this study will be genetically modified to make it very unlikely for rejection, "There are four genes knocked out that make them less pig like. And there are six genes knocked in, added, that make them more human like.”
The big question is who will go first in the clinical trial?
"It will probably be somebody who can understand what it will entail to get a pig organ and it's probably somebody who doesn't have a very good fighting chance of getting a human organ within the next five or ten years,” said Cameron.
The study starts next month, during which they say, their focus is on making sure the kidney transplant is safe and has a very high chance of working.
