A kidney transplanted from a pig has functioned inside a patient for 271 days, the longest time on record, American doctors say. Tim Andrews said the transplant gave him “hope” and saved him months of needing to go to hospital to have his blood filtered by a dialysis machine. The Mass General Brigham hospital team says their work shows that pig organs can be used as a “bridge” until a human transplant becomes available. But the pig organ eventually failed and was removed, so Andrews needed a short period of dialysis before a donor. It was found. Doctors and scientists are exploring xenotransplantation (using organs from other species) due to the shortage of organs for transplants. In the US, about 100,000 people are waiting for a kidney, while only 25,000 transplants are performed each year. More than 7,000 people in the UK are on the kidney transplant list. Andrews was told it could take seven years to get to the top of the list, but that people live only five years, on average, on dialysis. “I was a little short on time… it gets very depressing,” he said. But he described the idea of a pig transplant as “hope” and the “light at the end of the tunnel.” “Hope is the most important thing, the opportunity to be free from [dialysis] machine and live your life.”
