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.

Dr Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute, said the first transplant of the trial had already been carried out, with another expected to take place in January. Six patients are expected to receive the pig organs, which have been gene-edited in 10 places to reduce rejection by the human body.

Should the US Food and Drug Administration give approval, the trial will be expanded to involve 44 further transplants.

The approach, called xenotransplantation, is aimed at solving the shortage of human organs.

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.

“The truth is that there’s just never going to be enough human organs,” Dr Montgomery said.

He speaks from experience. He is not only a pioneering surgeon and one of Time magazine’s most influential people of 2025, but he has inherited a heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy, which killed his father and brother.

After Dr Montgomery experienced seven cardiac arrests — one resulted in a month-long coma — he received a heart transplant himself in 2018.

I think everybody really knows that we have a terrible problem in terms of rationing organs, because there’s such a scarcity of supply.

“But unless you’ve walked in the shoes of somebody who’s waiting for a transplant, you don’t really fully understand how unlikely it is that you’re going to receive a transplant in time,” he added.

He has pioneered new approaches to the supply of human organs, including domino-paired kidney transplants.

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.

Dr Montgomery has also been a leader in the use of organs from donors with hepatitis C, treating recipients with medication to clear the infection, and even accepted a hepatitis C–positive heart for his own heart transplant.

While the idea of xenotransplantation has been around for decades, recent developments have proved pivotal — including the ability to create gene-edited pigs.

Dr Montgomery carried out the world’s first gene-edited pig-to-human organ transplant in 2021.

While the recipient of the kidney was brain dead, Dr Montgomery said it was an important step, showing the organs were not immediately rejected and providing safety data that had opened the door for use in living people.