A Transplanted Pig Kidney Is Still Working After a Record-Setting 9 Months in a Patient

A Transplanted Pig Kidney Is Still Working After A Record-Setting 9 Months in a Patient

Sep 6, 2026 4:16pm

https://apple.news/A5qsbujydQ9SfL4vWxJi_6Q(opens in new tab)

So the real question is why haven’t we done this 50 years ago? The answer is animal viruses.  Most people don’t realize this, and I didn’t until 10 years into my career, what surprised me as much as it will surprise you is that our DNA is 50% viral. It’s not active viral, but it is definitely not human –  roughly 8% of of DNA is actually viral in humans and the other 42% is viral- like fragments that have just stuck around. The bottom line though is that because your DNA has so much viral material in it, it becomes problematic to take animal viral DNA and put it into a human. All viral DNA from the transplanted animal organ is  reactivated once transplanted into it’s human.  Our immune system has never seen these animal virus DNA portions before and mounts an attack; hence, animal transplants have been uniformly fatal.

So what’s new with this? What scientists are doing is taking pig DNA and stripping out the viruses to create genetically modified pigs.  These genetically modified pigs lack the viral DNA portions that cause the human immune system to attack.  Hence, through this method, we now have an unlimited source of organs that we can then transplant into people without waiting for human donors. As you may know the waiting list for human organs can be tends to hundreds of thousands of patients with many people dying prior to getting a transplant.  Once we can use these genetically modified pig organs and put them in anyone, organ failure will be a thing of the past. 

Of course, the best part, you can still eat the rest of the pig!