Pig hearts and kidneys: Barns may be future of organ transplantation
Piglets seen in a pig farm in 2017. (Photo by Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images)
A research farm in the mountains of Virginia is raising what’s becoming the future of medicine.
Thousands of Americans each year die waiting for an organ transplant, and many experts acknowledge there never will be enough human donors to meet the need.
So researchers are trying to use organs from pigs instead, and a handful of companies are engineering pigs to be more humanlike so people’s immune systems don’t immediately destroy the foreign tissue.
One of those companies is Revivicor, and The Associated Press visited their facility to see what it takes to clone and raise designer pigs for their organs.
Raising pigs for organs
This massive first-of-its-kind building bears no resemblance to a farm. It’s more like a pharmaceutical plant.
And part of it is closed to all but certain carefully chosen employees who take a timed shower, don company-provided clothes and shoes, and then enter an enclave where piglets are growing up.
Some of the world’s "cleanest" pigs are being raised here.
They breathe air and drink water that’s better filtered against contaminants than what's required for people. Even their feed gets disinfected – all to prevent them from picking up any possible infections that might ultimately harm a transplant recipient.
The first gene-edited pig organs ever transplanted into people came from animals born on this special research farm, behind locked gates, where entry requires washing down your vehicle, swapping your clothes for medical scrubs and stepping into tubs of disinfectant to clean your boots between each air-conditioned barn.
The biosecurity gets even tighter just a few miles away in Christiansburg, Virginia, where a new herd is being raised – pigs expected to supply organs for formal studies of animal-to-human transplantation as soon as next year.
Other companies engineering pigs are eGenesis and Makana Therapeutics.
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First pig organ transplants
In January 2022, doctors transplanted a pig's heart into a patient in a highly experimental and last-ditch effort to save his life. He survived for two months.
In September 2023, surgeons for the second time transplanted a pig’s heart into a dying man. Medical officials said his heart had seemed healthy for the first month but then began showing signs of rejection. That patient died about six weeks after the surgery.
In early 2024, in another medical first, a pig kidney was successfully transplanted into a man. Surgeons said they believed the pig kidney would last for at least two years, but the man died nearly two months after the procedure.
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Recently, scientists at other hospitals have tested pig kidneys and hearts in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough to begin formal studies of what are called xenotransplants.
This story was reported from Detroit. The Associated Press contributed.