Key Highlights
- Six patients are initially expected to receive the pig organs, which have been gene-edited in 10 places to reduce rejection by the human body. Should the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) give approval, the trial will be expanded to involve 44 further transplants. The approach, called xenotransplantation, is aimed at solving the shortage of human organs. According to the NHS Blood and Transplant, in the UK alone more than 12,000 people have died or been removed from the transplant waiting list over the past 10 years before receiving a new organ. Participants in the new trial are either ineligible for human kidney transplantation or on a waiting list for such an organ but thought to be more likely to die, or remain un-transplanted, within five years than receive it.“The truth is that there’s just never going to be enough human organs,” Montgomery told the Guardian. He speaks from experience.
- He is not only a pioneering transplant surgeon and one of Time Magazine’s most influential people of 2025, but he has inherited a heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy, which killed his father and brother.
- After Montgomery experienced seven cardiac arrests – one of which resulted in a month-long coma – he received a heart transplant himself in 2018.“I think everybody really knows that we have a terrible problem in terms of rationing organs because there’s such a scarcity of supply.
- But unless you’ve walked in the shoes of somebody who’s waiting for a transplant, you don’t really fully understand how unlikely it is that you’re going to receive a transplant in time,” he said. Montgomery has pioneered new approaches to increasing supply of human organs, including domino-paired kidney transplants.
- In this situation, a living donor whose kidney is incompatible with their expected recipient is matched with another patient, whose own incompatible donor is then matched to another patient and so on, creating a chain of donors and recipients that increases the availability of compatible organs. Montgomery has also been a leader in the use of organs from donors with hepatitis C, treating recipients with medication to clear the resulting infection, and even accepted a hepatitis C–positive heart for his own heart transplant. But he said other approaches were needed.“Having spent a career trying to increase incrementally the number of human organs available, I realised that we just weren’t making that much progress, not in a meaningful way,” he said.
