A leading surgeon leading a clinical trial to transplant pig kidneys into living humans says the organs may one day be even better than donated human organs.
According to RCO News Agency, Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, announced that the first transplant in the trial has been performed and the next transplant is expected in January. In the first stage, 6 patients are going to receive these pig organs; Organs that have been genetically edited at 10 points to reduce the possibility of their being rejected by the human body. If approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the trial will be expanded to include 44 other transplants.
According to the Guardian, this approach, which is called “interspecies transplant” (xenotransplantation), aims to solve the problem of shortage of human organs. According to statistics, in the UK alone over the last 10 years, more than 12,000 people have died or been removed from the transplant waiting list before receiving a new organ.
Participants in the new trial are either ineligible for a human kidney transplant, or are on a waiting list, but are predicted to be more likely to die or not receive a transplant over the next five years than they are to receive a human kidney. “The truth is there will never be enough human organs,” Montgomery told the Guardian.
He says this from personal experience. Not only is Montgomery a pioneering transplant surgeon and one of Time Magazine’s 2025 Most Influential People, he also suffers from an inherited heart disease called dilated cardiomyopathy; The disease that killed his father and brother. After Montgomery suffered seven cardiac arrests, one of which led to a month-long coma, he received a heart transplant in 2018.
He says: “Everyone knows that we are facing a terrible problem in terms of organ rationing, because the supply is extremely limited.” But until you’ve been in the shoes of someone waiting for a transplant, you don’t really understand how unlikely it is to get a transplant at the right time.
Montgomery has pioneered new ways to increase the supply of human organs, including the domino kidney chain transplant. In this method, a living donor whose kidney is not compatible with the intended recipient is matched with another patient; That patient’s incompatible donor is then matched with the next person and the chain continues, increasing the number of compatible organs.
He is also one of the leaders in using organs from donors who have hepatitis C; In this way, the recipients are treated with medicine to eliminate the infection. Montgomery even accepted a hepatitis C-positive heart for his own heart transplant. However, he said these methods alone are not enough. He added: “After a lifetime of trying to gradually increase the number of human organs, I have come to the conclusion that no significant progress has been made, and any progress we have made has been practically neutralized by the continuous increase in the number of people waiting in line.” While the idea of interspecies grafting has been around for decades, Montgomery said recent developments, including the possibility of producing genetically edited pigs, have been a turning point.
In 2021, Montgomery performed the world’s first transplant of a genetically edited pig organ into a human. Although the recipient of the kidney was a brain-dead person, he said the move was an important step because it showed the organ was not immediately rejected and provided critical safety data that paved the way for use in living humans.
He said it’s even possible that pig organs will be better for transplants than human organs in the future, because the chance of rejection can be reduced with more genetic editing. “It’s possible that at some point pig organs will be better than human organs, because we can keep tweaking them and making them better, which we can’t do with a human organ,” says Montgomery.
The studies conducted by Montgomery and other researchers show that transplanting the pig thymus gland, an organ that plays a role in the growth and selection of immune cells, together with the kidney, can increase immune tolerance; An issue that raises the possibility that in the future the need for anti aging drugs will be reduced or even completely eliminated. He said: “We haven’t reached that point yet, but that’s exactly why we’re doing these studies.”
Although this clinical trial is the first formal example of an interspecies transplant, pig organs have previously been transplanted into a limited number of humans, most of whom were severely ill.
In some cases, these patients later had to have organs removed, and others died; Although not necessarily due to direct transplant complications. However, Montgomery said there are two living recipients who still have a functioning pig kidney in their bodies. Kidneys and hearts are promising for interspecies transplantation, while lungs are more complicated, he said. He added: “In the case of the liver, it is not yet clear whether it will really work or not.” Montgomery said he is not opposed to receiving a pig heart.
He added: If such a situation occurs again and if I am healthy and alive, I will definitely think about it. I have children with the same genetic disease as me, and I always think about them and wish they had more options than my father, my brother, or myself.
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