A leading surgeon behind a clinical trial of transplanting pig kidneys into living humans has said they could one day be superior to those from human donors.<\/p>\n
Dr Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU Langone\u2019s Transplant Institute, said the first transplant of the trial<\/a> had already been carried out, with another expected to take place in January. Six patients are initially expected to receive the pig organs, which have been gene-edited in 10 places to reduce rejection by the human body.<\/p>\n Should the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) give approval, the trial will be expanded to involve 44 further transplants.<\/p>\n The approach, called xenotransplantation, is aimed at solving the shortage of human organs.<\/p>\n According to the NHS Blood and Transplant, in the UK alone more than 12,000 people have died or been removed from the transplant waiting list over the past 10 years before receiving a new organ.<\/p>\n Participants in the new trial are either ineligible for human kidney transplantation or on a waiting list for such an organ but thought to be more likely to die, or remain un-transplanted, within five years than receive it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe truth is that there\u2019s just never going to be enough human organs,\u201d Montgomery told the Guardian.<\/p>\n He speaks from experience. He is not only a pioneering transplant surgeon and one of Time Magazine\u2019s most influential people of 2025<\/a>, but he has inherited a heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy, which killed his father and brother. After Montgomery experienced seven cardiac arrests \u2013 one of which resulted in a month-long coma \u2013 he received a heart transplant himself<\/a> in 2018.<\/p>\n \u201cI think everybody really knows that we have a terrible problem in terms of rationing organs because there\u2019s such a scarcity of supply. But unless you\u2019ve walked in the shoes of somebody who\u2019s waiting for a transplant, you don\u2019t really fully understand how unlikely it is that you\u2019re going to receive a transplant in time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Montgomery has pioneered new approaches to increasing supply of human organs, including domino-paired kidney transplants<\/a>. In this situation, a living donor whose kidney is incompatible with their expected recipient is matched with another patient, whose own incompatible donor is then matched to another patient and so on, creating a chain of donors and recipients that increases the availability of compatible organs.<\/p>\n Montgomery has also been a leader in the use of organs from donors with hepatitis C, treating recipients with medication to clear the resulting infection, and even accepted a hepatitis C\u2013positive heart for his own heart transplant.<\/p>\n But he said other approaches were needed.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving spent a career trying to increase incrementally the number of human organs available, I realised that we just weren\u2019t making that much progress, not in a meaningful way,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd any progress we made was kind of deleted by the ever-expanding number of people who are waiting for transplants. \u201d<\/p>\n While the idea of xenotransplantation has been around for decades, Montgomery said recent developments had proved pivotal \u2013 including the ability to create gene-edited pigs. \u201cThere were all these kind of jokes about xenotransplantation, like it\u2019s just around the corner and it\u2019s an awfully long corner,\u201d he said. \u201cBut suddenly we\u2019re in it.\u201d<\/p>\n Montgomery carried out the world\u2019s first gene-edited pig-to-human organ transplant in 2021. While the recipient of the kidney was a brain dead individual, Montgomery said it was an important step, showing the organs were not immediately rejected and providing crucial safety data that had opened the door for use in living people.<\/p>\n Montgomery said it was even possible that pig organs could eventually become superior to human ones for transplants, with the possibility for further gene edits to make rejection less likely. \u201cThey could be superior at some point because we can constantly modify them to make them better, where you can\u2019t do that with a human organ,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n