WASHINGTON (AP) — Chinese researchers are reporting new steps in the quest for animal-to-human organ transplants – with a successful pig kidney transplant and a hint Wednesday that pig livers might eventually be useful, too.
A Chinese patient is the third person in world known to be living with a gene-edited pig kidney. And the same research team also reported an experiment implanting a pig liver into a brain-dead person.
Scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humanlike in hopes of alleviating a transplant shortage. Two initial xenotransplants in the U.S. — two pig hearts and two pig kidneys – were short-lived. But two additional pig kidney recipients so far are thriving – an Alabama woman transplanted in November and a New Hampshire man transplanted in January. A U.S. clinical trial is about to begin.
Nearly three weeks after the kidney surgery the Chinese patient "is very well” and the pig kidney likewise is functioning very well, Dr. Lin Wang of Xijing Hospital of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an told reporters in a briefing this week.
Wang, part of the hospital's xenotransplant team, said the kidney recipient remains in the hospital for testing. Chinese media have reported she is a 69-year-old woman diagnosed with kidney failure eight years ago.
But Wang pointed to a potential next step in xenotransplantation — learning to transplant pig livers. His team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature that a pig liver transplanted into a brain-dead person survived for 10 days, with no early signs of rejection. He said the pig liver produced bile and albumin — important for basic organ function — although not as much as human livers do.
The liver is a complex challenge because of its varied jobs, including removing waste, breaking down nutrients and medicines, fighting infection, storing iron and regulating blood clotting.
“We do find that it could function a little bit in a human being,” Wang said. He speculated that would be enough to help support a failing human liver.
In the U.S. last year, surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania attempted that sort of “bridge” support by externally attaching a pig liver to a brain-dead human body to filter blood, much like dialysis for failing kidneys. U.S. pig developer eGenesis is studying that approach.
In China, Wang’s team didn’t remove the deceased person’s own liver, instead implanting the pig liver near it.
That “clouds the picture,” said Dr. Parsia Vagefi, a liver transplant surgeon at UT Southwestern Medical Center who wasn't involved with the work. “It’s hopefully a first step but it’s still, a lot like any good research, more questions than answers.”
Wang said his team later replaced the human liver of another brain-dead person with a pig liver and is analyzing the outcome.
According to media reports, another Chinese hospital last year transplanted a pig liver into a living patient after a piece of his own cancerous liver was removed but it’s unclear how that experiment turned out.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - A miniature pig waits for visitors to feed it at a zoo in Shanghai, China, on Thursday Feb. 15, 2007. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Lawyers for imprisoned British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell are fighting the requested release of 90,000 pages related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell, saying a law used to force the public release of millions of documents is unconstitutional.
The lawyers filed papers late Friday in Manhattan federal court to try to block the release of documents from a since-settled civil defamation lawsuit brought a decade ago by the late Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell. The Justice Department recently asked a judge to lift secrecy requirements on the files.
Maxwell's attorneys said the Justice Department obtained the documents — otherwise subject to secrecy orders — improperly during its criminal probe of Maxwell. They said the documents include transcripts of over 30 depositions and private information regarding financial and sexual matters related to Maxwell and others.
Some records from the year-long exchange of evidence in the lawsuit battle were already released publicly in response to a federal appeals court order.
Maxwell’s lawyers say a law Congress passed in December to force the release of millions of Epstein-related documents violates the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine.
“Congress cannot, by statute, strip this Court of the power or relieve it of the responsibility to protect its files from misuse. To do so violates the separation of powers,” wrote the lawyers, Laura Menninger and Jeffrey Pagliuca about the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, neither Congress nor the Executive Branch may intrude on the judicial power. That power includes the power to definitively and finally resolve cases and disputes,” the lawyers added.
The release of Epstein-related documents from criminal probes that began weeks ago has resulted in new revelations about Epstein's decades-long sexual abuse of women and teenage girls. Some victims have complained that their names and personal information were revealed in documents while the names of their abusers were blacked out.
Members of Congress have complained that only about half of existing documents, many with redactions, have been made public even as Justice Department officials have said everything has been released, except for some files that can't be made public until a judge gives the go-ahead.
Giuffre said Epstein had trafficked her to other men, including the former Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. She sued Mountbatten-Windsor in 2021, claiming that they had sex when she was 17.
He denied her claims and the two settled the lawsuit in 2022. Days ago, he was arrested and held in custody for nearly 11 hours on suspicion of misconduct in having shared confidential trade information with Epstein.
In a memoir published after she killed herself last year, Giuffre wrote that prosecutors told her they didn’t include her in the sex trafficking prosecution of Maxwell because they didn’t want her allegations to distract the jury.
Maxwell, 64, was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Epstein took his own life in a federal lockup in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a low-security prison camp in Texas last summer after she participated in two days of interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Two weeks ago, she declined to answer questions from House Oversight Committee lawmakers in a deposition conducted in a a video call to her federal prison camp, though she indicated through a statement from her lawyer that she was “prepared to speak fully and honestly” if granted clemency.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
A document that was included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, photographed Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026, shows a photo of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2019. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
