Pig kidney offers bridge for patients facing long transplant waits

Patients in the United States can wait years for a human kidney, while researchers are testing genetically modified pig organs as a temporary solution, mbl.is reports. Icelandic doctor Ragnar Pálsson, a kidney transplant specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is among the authors of a study on the treatment.

Earlier this month, media outlets reported that US patient Tim Andrews had lived for 271 days with a pig kidney transplanted at Massachusetts General Hospital on January 25 last year. He later received a human kidney in a second operation in October.

No one had previously lived so long with a pig kidney. Only a small number of such procedures have been carried out worldwide, using kidneys from Yucatan miniature pigs that have undergone 69 genetic modifications intended to make their organs more compatible with human patients.

The study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, examined the first human patients to receive kidneys from genetically modified Yucatan pigs as an interim solution while they waited for a human donor organ.

About 100,000 people are on the kidney transplant waiting list in the United States at any given time, while around 25,000 people receive a kidney from a human donor there each year.

Ragnar was one of 35 authors of the study. He is now part of a team at Massachusetts General Hospital that assesses potential kidney donors and evaluates and treats recipients who receive pig kidneys to bridge the long wait for a human organ.

He said he entered medicine partly by chance. He had not intended to become a doctor but decided at the last minute to take the entrance examination during its first year.

Ragnar grew up partly in the United States and had long been interested in completing his specialist training there. He moved to the country in 2012 for specialist training in internal medicine at Duke University in North Carolina, then moved to Boston in 2015 to specialise in nephrology.

He has worked at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, another major Harvard teaching hospital across the city. He has also worked at Landspítali, Iceland’s national hospital, travelling back and forth between the two countries.

Since 2024, Boston has been his main place of work. He said that long-term life in the United States was not an effortless decision.