Monday, December 26, 2016
Doctors may soon transplant a pig kidney to humans — and it could be one of medicine's biggest breakthroughs
If you need a kidney transplant tomorrow, chances are you will wait around three years. Even before you get transplanted, assuming you live, you will most likely spend years on dialysis. Right now there are more than 100,000 people in the US waiting for kidney transplants. Every year nearly 5,000 people will die just waiting for one. On the horizon though, is a potential source of donors that may revolutionize kidney transplantation as we know it. Best of all, it may be that we only have to go to a local farm to get one.