THE ENTRY REQUIREMENTS should have come with an instruction booklet: Sign in at the security hut. Shoes off at the door. Over to the locker room for a hot shower. Into a long protective surgical smock and knee-high rubber waders, and finally, a pair of safety goggles, which—in the clammy heat of the laboratory complex—quickly began to fog.
“Sorry for the trouble,” smiled my tour guide, Bjoern Petersen, waving me forward. “We just have to be exceptionally careful about pathogens. You’ll get used to it, I promise.”
A couple of hours earlier, I’d awoken in a hotel in a Midwestern city I’ve been asked not to name. Now, with the sun curdling above the surrounding pasture and a gauze of mist in the air, I found myself following Petersen, a German-born scientist, through the corridors of a highly secret research facility and across a muddy courtyard crosshatched with boot prints. “When we bought the place,” he said, “the owners were using it as a livestock research facility.” He indicated an adjacent barn. “The cattle were here, and the horses in the field up there. We’ve kept the same basic layout, though obviously our purpose is very different.”
He said something else as we entered the barn, but I didn’t catch it—his voice had been drowned out by a raucous chorus of expectant grunts and the clatter of trotters on cement. A dozen-odd pigs surged forward to the edges of the individual enclosures, clanging their snouts against the metal gates. “I want you to meet someone,” Petersen said, blinking into the harsh overhead light. He stopped near the pen of an animal whose name card identified her as Margarita. She curled her body against Petersen’s hand, in the manner of an oversize house cat. “Margarita was one of our first,” Petersen said proudly, leaning down to stroke the protuberant black hairs between the pig’s ears. “Most of these animals you’re looking at were created from the same cells. But there’s something special about the first, don’t you think?”
Petersen, who serves as the site head at the farm, is a specialist in livestock cloning and xenotransplantation—an exceedingly advanced scientific technique in which animal matter is transferred into human patients. (The name derives from the Greek for “strange” or “foreign.”) In 2023, after nearly a quarter century working at government research institutions in Europe, Petersen uprooted his family and moved to the Midwest to take a job with eGenesis—a biotech firm backed by a group of venture capital firm investors—then in the early phases of a remarkable plan to develop genetically modified pig kidneys for transplantation into humans. Powered by advances in gene editing and immunosuppressive medicine, eGenesis had quickly demonstrated that its organs could survive for long periods in the bodies of primate test subjects, filtering blood and producing urine as ably as an “allotransplanted,” or same-species, kidney.
eGenesis scientist Raquel Castro pre-pares pig cells for the cloning process. The first stages entail using the gene- editing technique CRISPR to modify a cell sample. The modifications ensure the eventual kidney grown in a pig will be accepted by the human patient’s immune system.
Now, two years later, Petersen and eGenesis stand at the forefront of a major revolution in the science of organ transplantation—a revolution that will have implications for the global human donor shortage and the thousands of sick patients who wait every year for a new kidney. Already, the results have been astonishing: a progression from trial transplants on primates to transplant surgery on brain-dead human recipients—and finally, last March, in a development that made global headlines, to a transplant into a living human recipient.
Food and Drug Administration officials have since given eGenesis the green light to conduct a three-patient clinical trial, a move that added to the surging interest the company has generated since last year’s historic xenotransplant. Provided it stays on track and its trials prove successful, eGenesis’s CEO Mike Curtis says, the company is making plans to grow its production capacity, and he thinks the science could become widely available to the public before the decade is out. “In the long term,” he added, “I’d argue we’re looking at a scenario where cross-species transplants fully supplant allotransplants. Where we don’t need human donors anymore.”
Reaching that point will require further refinement of the technology and will demand more pigs like Margarita and scientists like Petersen. But more than anything, it will require trust on the part of those who go under the knife, who put their lives in the hands of this cutting-edge science and the doctors and hospitals championing it. And last year’s successful xenotransplant—a four-hour procedure completed at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital that demanded untested faith, a hefty dose of desperation, and an unmeasurable amount of luck—was perhaps the most significant step forward into this new future.
(The doctor who believes pig hearts could end our organ shortage.)
