Ren Xiaoping, who once vowed to perform the world’s first human head transplant, has operated on a patient’s severed spinal cord in a 12-hour landmark operation in Moscow, according to the Chinese surgeon and Russian state sources.
Ren said the procedure was carried out at the Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine in Russia last week.
“It was our Guangxi University of Chinese Medicine Second Affiliated Hospital and the Russian team working together,” Ren told the South China Morning Post on Thursday.
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According to an article quoting Ren and published in the New Scientist on Wednesday, the team removed a segment of spinal cord that had been severed by trauma three years earlier and replaced it with a segment from a brain-dead donor, using microsurgery and polyethylene glycol, a substance that helps fuse cell membranes for the “world’s first spinal cord transplant”.
“The surgery was completed on October 14-15, lasting 12 hours. The patient’s condition is currently stable,” he said.