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.
In 1984 at Loma Linda University Medical Center an infant girl known as "Baby Fae" received the first xenotransplant, also known as non-human to human transplant. In this case, Baby Fae received a baboon heart in a last ditch effort to save her life. Sadly, Baby Fae died 21 days later.




























