内容摘要：Now, the heiau and gardens are open to visitors, more than half of whom are local schoolchildren, says Leung.

Now, the heiau and gardens are open to visitors, more than half of whom are local schoolchildren, says Leung.

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.

Only rigorous studies comparing similarly ill patients will offer a clearer picture of pig organs’ potential – maybe those like Looney. Despite eight years of dialysis, she wasn’t nearly as sick as prior xenotransplant recipients but couldn’t find a matching donor. Like Berrios, she had a highly sensitized immune response.

Looney may be “kind of a litmus test” for trial candidates, said NYU’s Montgomery, who led her transplant with her original surgeon in Alabama, Dr. Jayme Locke. “She’s received the transplant at just the right time,” before dialysis did too much damage.Still, “this is a research pig that FDA approved so let’s get it to the patients,” is how Ayares describes beginning the shipments a few years ago.

Revivicor’s GalSafe herd is housed in Iowa and to keep its numbers in check, some meat is periodically processed in a slaughterhouse certified by the U.S. Agriculture Department. Revivicor then mails frozen shipments to alpha-gal syndrome patients who’ve filled out applications for the pork.Thank-you letters relating the joy of eating bacon again line a bulletin board near the freezer in Revivicor’s corporate office.

Separately, pigs with various gene modifications for xenotransplant research live on a Revivicor farm in Virginia, including a GalSafe pig that was the source for aat NYU Langone Health.