What Happened to the First Patients Who Received Gene-Edited Pig Kidneys

Two patients who received genetically modified pig kidneys have since been transplanted with human organs. On the surface, that looks like a return to the starting point. For the biotech company eGenesis and the wider field, however, the cases serve as an early marker for a "bridge" concept: using an animal organ to keep a patient alive while waiting for a compatible human donor. The two cases were distinct. In the first, a 57-year-old man received a modified pig kidney at NYU Langone Health in July 2023. The key signal from that procedure was that the body did not immediately reject the organ, the central obstacle in xenotransplantation. The second case involved a person with declared brain death. Surgeons transplanted a pig kidney and were able to observe how the animal organ functioned inside a human body without putting a living patient at risk.