Beatriz Domínguez-Gil

A team from China has reported the results of the first liver transplant from a pig to a living human. Earlier this year, a procedure that served as a proof of concept was published, but it was performed on a brain-dead person. In this case, after modifying 10 genes in the porcine liver, an auxiliary transplant—not removing the entire organ—was performed on a 71-year-old patient with cirrhosis and liver cancer. It worked well for the first month, but on day 38, the graft had to be removed due to the development of complications, and the patient died on day 171. According to the researchers, who published the case in the Journal of Hepatology, this is "a fundamental step that demonstrates both the promise and the obstacles that remain to be overcome".

The Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for describing how the immune system is regulated so as not to harm us. His groundbreaking discoveries on peripheral immune tolerance have spurred the development of new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

A team in China has transplanted a pig lung, genetically modified using CRISPR, into a brain-dead human. According to the researchers, this is the first time a lung transplant of this kind has been performed. The organ remained viable for the nine days of the study, although it showed some signs of damage and immune rejection. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Patients receiving organ transplants often need to be treated with long-term immunosuppressants to reduce the likelihood of rejection, which has numerous side effects. An international team has shown in crab macaque monkeys that, in the case of heart transplantation, the use of these drugs could be avoided if combined with a kidney transplant from the same donor. The results are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.