How long before humans have kidneys from a pig?

HOW would you feel about having a heart or kidney transplant from a pig? That possibility came a step closer recently when NYU Langone Health in New York announced that a pig’s kidney, attached to a human patient, was able to generate and filter waste without being rejected.

This operation was very unusual: the patient was brain-dead and the pig ‘donor’ had been genetically modified to make its body parts more compatible with ours.

Over the past 30 years we have been replacing failing human heart valves with pig heart valves, as a pig heart is roughly the same size, weight and structure as a human one. But the dream has been to go further, to use pigs as a source of major organs such as a heart or a kidney.

This is driven by an urgent need for more organs. In the UK more than 6,100 people are waiting for an organ transplant, including 4,584 waiting for a kidney. The shortage is so acute that I once came across a case where a father gave away both his healthy kidneys to his two sons (whose kidneys had both failed), leaving him needing dialysis.

Animal welfare concerns apart, the main problem has been organ rejection. Your immune system will recognise a pig kidney as alien and attack it.

Pigs are so different from us that anti-rejection drugs alone would not be enough. So the New York scientists genetically modified the pig so its kidney was less likely to be attacked by our immune system. The lead surgeon says it will be a year or two before they try this on a living patient and much longer before pig organs are more widely available. In the meantime, you can help by telling your family you’d like to be a donor, and recording your decision online on the NHS Organ Donor Register.