Who wants a pig organ? Patients sick and tired of waiting years for a transplant
People worried they'll never get a scarce human transplant want to know when they might get a pig kidney instead
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The calls and emails started coming into NYU Langone Health and Massachusetts General Hospital soon after doctors began experimenting with pig organs in humans.
People worried they’ll never get a scarce human transplant asked: When could we get a pig kidney?
Alex Berrios of Louisville, Kentucky, needs a second transplant but finding another human match is proving impossible. So he's closely watching for a chance at pig kidney research.
«It may not work, and I have to be OK with that,” Berrios said. “I think it’s worth the shot.”
Now two U.S. companies aim to begin the world’s first clinical trials of xenotransplantation in 2025 – using pig kidneys or hearts to try to save human lives. Would-be volunteers are impatient to see if they'll qualify as researchers fine-tune how best to test if the humanized pig organs they’ve designed might really work.
Anticipation is growing with news that an Alabama woman was faring well after a pig kidney transplant at NYU in late November. Towana Looney is the fifth American to receive a gene-edited pig organ, each case so far an emergency experiment for people out of options.
None of the previous recipients — two given pig hearts and two kidneys — survived more than two months but that hasn't deterred researchers hunting an alternative to the dire shortage of transplantable organs.
“We have to have the courage to continue,” said University of Maryland transplant surgeon Dr. Bartley Griffith.
Back in 2022, Griffith had a hard time figuring out how to ask a dying patient if he’d consider undergoing the world’s first transplant of a gene-edited pig heart.
“I
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