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InnovationRx is your weekly digest of healthcare news. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here. R esearchers announced an early but significant step in xenotransplantation — transplanting organs from one species to another — this week. A team of surgeons at NYU Langone in New York City said they successfully attached a pig kidney to a human patient in September. While the organ remained outside the body of a brain-dead person on life support, Forbes’ Robert Hart reports it’s an important milestone given 17 people in the U.S. die each day while waiting for an organ transplant. There’s also new developments in organ transport. Forbes contributor Victoria Forster writes that a pair of human lungs was flown via drone in a 6-minute ride between two hospitals in Toronto, Canada. Speed is a key factor in organ transplants, as there’s a short window once the organ leaves the donor and must be inserted before it loses function. British startup Healx has secured FDA approval for a phase 2a clinical trial of an AI-discovered compound that could help manage the symptoms of the genetic disorder Fragile X syndrome. There is no cure for the genetic disorder, which affects around 1 in 4,000 boys, and can cause autism, intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders.
