Researchers plan to track the organ's performance for a second month. It's another step in the long quest to one day use animal organs to save human lives. More than 100,000 patients are on the nation’s transplant list and thousands die each year waiting.
My dad worked on the beginnings of this research back in the day. He said the challenge was as soon as you engineered a gene out of the pig to get rid of a protein that would trigger an immune reaction in humans, they’d find another one. So it was whack-a-mole for a while. It’s cool to see this come to fruition as a technology. And just in time for self driving vehicles which will decimate the organ supply.