A lung from a genetically modified pig has been transplanted into a person for the first time1. The recipient, a 39-year-old man in China, was brain dead, but the organ survived for nine days.
At least half a dozen people in the United States and China have received organs from genome-edited pigs, including hearts, kidneys, livers and a thymus. The latest procedure suggests that almost any pig organ could be transplanted into people, researchers say. They hope that such organs might one day save the thousands of people who die each year while waiting for a donor organ.
Lungs are the most difficult organ to transplant, says Muhammad Mohiuddin, a surgeon and researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who in 2022 led the first pig-heart transplant into a living person. Lungs have the most blood vessels of any transplantable organ, so are more prone to attack from the immune system, which can lead to blood clots and tissue damage, says Mohiuddin. “I applaud their effort,” he says: “it’s a first step” towards lung xenotransplantation, the use of organs from other species in humans. US clinical trials for pig livers and pig kidneys were approved this year.