Test results of the transplanted kidney’s function “looked pretty normal,” said transplant surgeon, Dr Robert Montgomery, who led the study.

The recipient’s abnormal creatinine level – an indicator of poor kidney function – returned to normal after the transplant, Montgomery said.

In the United States, nearly 107,000 people are presently waiting for organ transplants, including more than 90,000 awaiting a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Wait times for a kidney average three to five years.

Researchers have been working for decades on the possibility of using animal organs for transplants, but have been stymied over how to prevent immediate rejection by the human body.

Montgomery’s team theorised that knocking out the pig gene for a carbohydrate that triggers rejection – a sugar molecule, or glycan, called alpha-gal – would prevent the problem.

Other researchers are considering whether GalSafe pigs can be sources of everything from heart valves to skin grafts for human patients.

The NYU kidney transplant experiment should pave the way for trials in patients with end-stage kidney failure, possibly in the next year or two, said Montgomery, himself a heart transplant recipient.

Participants would probably be patients with low odds of receiving a human kidney and a poor prognosis on dialysis.

“For a lot of those people, the mortality rate is as high as it is for some cancers, and we don’t think twice about using new drugs and doing new trials (in cancer patients) when it might give them a couple of months more of life,” Montgomery said.

The researchers worked with medical ethicists, legal and religious experts to vet the concept before asking a family for temporary access to a brain-dead patient, Montgomery said.

The researchers worked with medical ethicists, legal and religious experts to vet the concept before asking a family for temporary access to a brain-dead patient, Montgomery said.