Shortages of Kidneys may be thing of past after first successful pig to human transplant. 

Early this week a surgical team attached a pig kidney to a human patient during a groundbreaking procedure. After a 54-hour observation period in New York City, the surgery was called a success. This has the protentional to impact the nearly 100,000 people that are stuck on the transplant waitlist and the 17 people that die each day waiting on the list.

John Scandling, a nephrologist at Stanford University stated, “We’re never going to satisfy the organ shortage problem with human organs. There’s a limit to the number of deceased donor organs that are available.”

While the successful pig transplant may seem like a perfect solution to the waitlist problem it does come with its drawbacks. As Dr, Scandling pointed out, “In recent decades we were not as successful. You could visibly see the organs fail in those days because there’s an immediate reaction. That immediate reaction, called a hyperacute rejection, is the first major obstacle for a xenotransplant to stick.”

Despite recent failures, this one success can point to a brighter future. Doctors believe that transplants with animals could become more common than those done with humans. Doing transplants with animals could save 100,000’s of lives and make kidney shortages a thing of the past.