内容摘要：“We can’t always expect placebo-controlled trials,” Scott said. “It’s imperative that be communicated clearly to the public, but it’s challenging especially when there’s so much noise in social media and so much misinformation.”

“We can’t always expect placebo-controlled trials,” Scott said. “It’s imperative that be communicated clearly to the public, but it’s challenging especially when there’s so much noise in social media and so much misinformation.”

“There’s just something about being part of something like that, that is so cutting-edge,” said McNew, who spotted news of NYU’s xenotransplant research in 2023 and emailed his interest.For Louisville’s Berrios, donor scarcity isn’t the only hurdle. Born with a single kidney that failed in his late 20s, a living donor transplant restored his health for 13 years. But it failed in 2020 and he has since developed antibodies that would destroy another human kidney, what doctors call “highly sensitized.”

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Berrios quietly slips out of his home before dawn to spend nearly four hours tethered to a dialysis machine. Getting the grueling treatments at 5 a.m. is the only way the father of two can both stay alive and hold down a fulltime job.But dialysis doesn’t fully replace kidney function – people slowly get sicker. So even as Berrios tried an experimental therapy to tamp down his problem antibodies, he told NYU he’s interested in a pig kidney.FDA rules require that pig organs be extensively tested in monkeys or baboons before humans. And while researchers have extended those primates’ survival to a year, sometimes longer, they were desperate for experience with people. After all, the pig organs are genetically altered to be more humanlike, not more baboon-like.

, surgeons first tested pig organs in bodies of thedonated for scientific research.

And patients given pig organs so far have been “compassionate use” transplants, experiments that FDA allows in select emergency cases for people out of other options.

Although the first four didn’t survive long, in part because of complications from other diseases, those experiments proved pig organs could work at least for a while and offered other lessons. For example, discovery of a hidden pig virus in the first heart transplant prompted better tests for that risk.Jones came back to the Basin area after pharmacy school. His daughter Camilla would come into the pharmacy with him on Sundays and he’d quiz her on different medications.

She’s now the president-elect of the state pharmacy association and helps run the Basin pharmacy.“We’ve definitely tried to do everything we can to run lean to find other options to try and make money to keep our doors open so we can continue to serve patients,” Camilla Hancock said. “But when you’re working so hard and you’re trying your darndest to accomplish these things, and you just kind of get kicked in the gut over and over, it’s really disheartening.”

If it weren’t for the “devastating” impact on his daughter’s future, Jones admitted, “I’d pack it in.”“I wish I could say I had this healthy, wonderful business I could hand off to my daughter,” he said. “But I worry whether it’s even going to be worthwhile for her to take it over if we can’t make a profit on it or even pay our own wages.”