Chinese doctors said Wednesday that they had transplanted a liver from a genetically modified pig into a brain-dead human for the first time, raising hopes of a life-saving donor option for patients in the future.
Pigs have emerged as the best animal organ donors, with several living patients in the United States having received pig kidneys or hearts in the last few years.
Livers have proved trickier — and had not previously been tested out inside a human body. But with a huge and growing demand for liver donations across the world, researchers hope that gene-edited pigs can offer at least temporary relief to seriously ill patients on long waiting lists.
Doctors at the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an, China, announced the field’s latest breakthrough in a study in the journal Nature.
