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# A Pig Named Wilma Kept a Man Alive for 271 Days
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/a-pig-named-wilma-kept-a-man-alive-for-271-days/
- Published: 2026-10-12T10:01:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T10:00:59.000Z
- Description: The kidney failed in the end, and nobody is treating that as a defeat. What a borrowed organ was for turns out to matter more than how long it lasted.
- Author: Dispatch
- Tags: Medicine & Health

Tim Andrews had a 9 percent chance of getting a human kidney in the next five years and a better than 40 percent chance that he would die or lose his place on the list first. So in January 2025, surgeons at Mass General Brigham gave him one from a pig named Wilma.

It worked for 271 days. That is the record.

Wilma's genome had undergone 69 modifications to make the organ viable. Some were aimed at viruses that could threaten a human recipient. Others made the kidney a closer match for a human body, lowering the chance that his immune system would reject it.

About six months in, the kidney's blood vessels began to break down, and at nine months surgeons took it out. Andrews went back on dialysis for several months, then got a new kidney, this one from a deceased human donor. Six months on, that kidney was working well, the team reported in The Lancet.

No one with a pig kidney had gone longer without dialysis, and no patient before him had moved from a pig kidney to a human one.

The team was careful to say that one patient, with nobody to compare him against, proves little, and that he was carefully chosen and closely looked after. One case is not a clinical trial. But one case was also, until now, impossible.

Demand for human kidneys runs far ahead of supply. Wilma may have just shown the math a way out.

**Read the full story at** [The Guardian, September 3, 2026](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/sep/03/genetically-modified-pig-kidney-keeps-man-alive-record-nine-months?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** The organ shortage has a waiting list, an actuarial table and a decade of unanswered letters. Wilma cut through all three in 271 days.