Doctors researching using animal kidneys for transplants

The numbers are staggering. About 100,000 people are on a waitlist for a kidney transplant, but there aren’t enough donors.

While they haven’t perfected it, researchers are working to see whether some animals may be able to fill the gap.

When it comes to saving lives for people with kidney disease, the math just does not add up.

“When you think about 37 million Americans with chronic kidney disease and at any given time, six to 800,000 have actual kidney failure, and we only waitlist 80 to 100,000, and we only transplant 25,000,” said Dr. Jayme E. Locke, Transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are some of the first to fill the need with xenotransplantation.

“The goal, of course, is to basically eliminate that gap between supply and demand, and in our case, we’re hoping to do that with pig organs. Well, interestingly, pigs actually have kidney function that’s quite similar to humans,” Locke said.

Researchers use a “crispr,” which is a genetic editing tool, to edit out genes that would cause a human body to reject the organ.

“It kind of tricks the human immune system into thinking it’s something from a human,” Locke said.

And because pigs can live 30 years, researchers believe the organ will last that long for humans, and they hope to use more organs from pigs.

“And so I think certainly those of us in xenotransplantation see a future in which one pig can donate a heart, a pair of lungs, a liver, a kidney, maybe even a pancreas,” Locke said.

This hopes to get more people on and off the transplant waiting list.

Several pig organ transplant recipients died in recent months following their operation. It’s important to remember that pig-kidney donation is still very much in the experimental stages.

However, researchers are committed to perfecting this alternative source of organs when human organs are not available.