How a family’s choice to donate a body for pig kid...

NEW YORK (AP) — Mary Miller-Duffy was dazed and grieving. Her brother suddenly collapsed and days later was brain-dead. Now she faced a tough question: Would she donate his body for research?

That’s how the body of Maurice “Mo” Miller started its journey to a sunny corner of NYU Langone Health’s intensive care unit — and became part of the quest to one day ease the nation’s transplant shortage with organs from animals.

“He always wanted to help people,” said Miller-Duffy, who struggled with the choice but is proud of her brother’s last act. “This tragic death, this fast short death — something good has come out of it.”

Surgeons replaced Miller’s kidneys with one from a genetically modified pig on July 14. Then doctors and nurses cared for the deceased man like they would a living patient while anxiously ticking off the days.

Remarkably, over a month later the new organ is performing all the bodily functions of a healthy kidney — the longest a pig kidney has ever worked in a person. Now the countdown is on to see if the kidney can last into September, a second month.

The Associated Press got an inside look at the challenges of experiments with the dead that may help bring animal-to-human transplants closer to reality.

Getting an organ transplant today is a long shot. More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list, most who need a kidney. Thousands die waiting. Thousands more who could benefit aren’t even added to the list.

“I had seven cardiac arrests before I even was sick enough” to qualify for a new heart, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, chief of NYU Langone’s transplant institute. He’s a kidney transplant surgeon — and was lucky enough to get his own heart transplant in 2018.

Filling the gap, he’s convinced, will require using animal organs.

Mary Miller-Duffy speaks with Dr. Robert Montgomery in the NYU Langone Health medical center in New York on Aug. 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Shelby Lum)

After decades of failed attempts, now pigs genetically modified so their organs are more humanlike are renewing interest in so-called xenotransplantation. Last year, University of Maryland surgeons tried to save a dying man with a pig heart — and he survived for two months.

Montgomery is getting more practice in the dead before taking a chance with a living patient. A handful of prior experiments at NYU and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have kept pig kidneys and hearts working in donated bodies for a few days to a week, avoiding the immediate rejection that doomed many earlier attempts.

But the most common kind of organ rejection develops over a month. That pig heart in Maryland worked great for nearly 50 days until abruptly faltering. Watching how pig kidneys reach those timepoints in donated bodies could offer vital lessons — but how long could Montgomery expect a family to turn over their loved one?

“I’m in awe of someone who can make a decision like that at, you know, one of the worst moments in their lives and really think about ... humanity,” he said.

In Newburgh, New York, an ambulance had raced Miller to the hospital after he collapsed, a mass in his brain. He never woke up from the biopsy, brain-dead at just 57. Next steps were up to his sister, his closest relative.