Overview

• Massachusetts General Hospital reported a third experimental transplant: 54-year-old Bill Stewart received a pig kidney on June 14, was discharged a week later, and is back to work without dialysis.
• Tim Andrews, 67, remains alive and dialysis-free more than seven months after his January surgery, the longest reported survival of a pig organ in a living person.
• FDA investigational clearance moves xenotransplantation from isolated compassionate-use cases into a regulated clinical study.
• The eGenesis trial plans to treat about 30 people age 50 or older who are on dialysis, while United Therapeutics prepares a similar FDA-approved study to expand testing.
• Donor pigs are deeply engineered: antigens such as alpha-gal are knocked out, multiple human genes are added, and endogenous retroviruses are inactivated to lower rejection and infection risks.