The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Short Wave
NPR
4.7 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2024
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Towana is a 53-year-old grandmother from Gadsden, Ala. She's been on dialysis for four hours a day, three days a week since 2016. Her immune system would reject a human kidney. So the Food and Drug Administration made an exception to its usual clinical study requirements to allow Looney this new kind of pig kidney. But the procedure is controversial.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This message comes from Side Note by ASAP Science, a podcast about the science behind controversial subjects. |
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| 0:16.0 | You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. |
| 0:21.3 | Hey, shortwaver is Regina Barber here, and I'm here with my colleague, NPR health correspondent, and awesome guy, Rob Stein. |
| 0:27.8 | Hey, Rob. |
| 0:28.5 | Hey, Gina. |
| 0:29.5 | I hear that you've been working on this really interesting story for the past year. |
| 0:33.6 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 0:34.1 | I've been following the developments of a biotech company called Revivacore that's been moving towards a very ambitious goal, and that is to use cloned genetically modified farm animals to provide organs for transplants for humans. |
| 0:49.9 | Okay, so you're saying farm animals. So there's like a farm just full of cloned animals. |
| 0:54.4 | Yeah, yeah. In fact, I went to visit this farm. I drove down a road through the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwest Virginia to visit the River River Farm back in February. |
| 1:04.1 | This farm, it is like 22 buildings and around 300 pigs. |
| 1:10.1 | We had to change into hospital scrub before going inside to protect the pigs. |
| 1:14.7 | They're really careful to make sure visitors don't bring any pathogens that could infect the pigs. |
| 1:19.9 | When we went into the buildings, we stepped into these tubs of disinfecting fluid to sterilize our boots. |
| 1:25.7 | And then I got to see these cloned genetically modified adult |
| 1:30.4 | female pigs. Do you want to hold one? It's okay. Yeah. It's okay. And some of them were |
| 1:40.1 | pregnant with cloned pig embryos that were also genetically modified. Well, you're like |
| 1:45.5 | brachied my brain here. Okay, so they're these identical organs in all of these pigs so they can be |
| 1:50.6 | used in humans, right? That's the idea. That's right. They clone these pigs. They all have these |
... |
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