[Comment] Kidney xenotransplantation—bridge to allotransplantation or destination treatment?

AI Summary

Porcine kidney xenotransplantation advances rapidly from preclinical to human recipients, with a notable reported case supporting a living recipient for 271 days before transplant to a deceased-donor kidney. This progress addresses the shortage of human kidneys and represents a significant milestone in transplantation medicine.

The shortage of human kidneys remains a central problem in transplantation, and many candidates die or are removed from the waiting list before an organ becomes available.1 Genetically engineered porcine kidneys have long been proposed to expand the donor pool,2 and over the past 3 years the field has rapidly moved from preclinical models to decedent models to living recipients.3–5 In their Article, Leonardo Riella and colleagues report a porcine kidney xenograft that supported a living human recipient for 271 days—the longest dialysis-free xenograft function described to date—followed by explantation and a subsequent deceased-donor human kidney transplantation.