Massachusetts, March 22 (HBTV): Doctors have performed the first transplant of a genetically modified kidney from a pig into a living human, they announced Thursday.

The four-hour surgery was performed Saturday at Massachusetts General Hospital, which was also the first hospital to perform a kidney transplant in 1954.

The patient, Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old manager with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation who was diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease, is recovering well and expected to be discharged from the hospital soon.

Doctors said Thursday that they thought his new kidney could last years but also acknowledged that there are many unknowns in animal-to-human transplants.

In a written statement provided by the hospital, Slayman said he had been a patient in the hospital’s transplant program for 11 years. He previously received a kidney from a human donor in 2018 after living with diabetes and high blood pressure for many years. That kidney began to show signs of failure five years later, and he resumed dialysis in 2023.

When he was diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease, he said, his doctors suggested that he try a pig kidney.

“I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” Slayman said in the statement.

Experts say xenotransplants – transplants of animal organs into people – are crucial to solving the organ shortage.

“It also could be a potential breakthrough in solving one of the more intractable problems in our field, that being an unequal access for ethnic minority patients to the opportunity for kidney transplantation,” said Dr. Winfred Williams, associate chief of the Department of Nephrology at Mass General, in the news briefing.

The researchers at Mass General Brigham said that although the latest advance was important, more research is needed – ideally a large study conducted at many hospitals – to better understand how effective pig kidney transplants may be.  

Inputs from CNN