There are more than 100,000 people currently waiting for an organ transplant and it’s estimated that another person is added to the waitlist every 8 minutes, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. There aren’t enough organs to go around and 17 people die each day waiting for one, HRSA estimates, writes ABC NEWS.

Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, understands this problem better than most. He’s not just a transplant surgeon, he’s also an organ recipient, having received a donor heart: “Even though I had seven cardiac arrests and could have died in any of those events, I still was not sick enough to really draw an organ. And that’s really when it became so clear to me that we had to find another source of organs other than human organs”.

A possible answer: genetically modified animal organs. In 2022, Maryland man David Bennett Sr. lived 60 days as the first person to receive a pig heart - his severe congestive heart failure meant he wasn’t a candidate for a human transplant. Bennett and 3 others received gene-edited pig organs through the FDA"s compassionate use program, which allows xenotransplants under special and highly vetted circumstances. All four of these people died within three months of their surgeries, but this experimental procedure continues to develop.

ABC News became the first television crew invited to a Blacksburg, Virginia, research farm that raises pigs. The pigs born on this farm are genetically modified to delete certain pig genes and add human genes, so it’s less likely the recipient’s body will reject the organ. Dr. David Ayares is the president and chief scientific officer of Revivicor, the United Therapeutics-owned company that raised the gene-edited pigs used for Bennett’s and others’ transplants. Ayares has made perfecting these transplants his life’s work: “If you were to put an unmodified farm pig organ, whether it’s a kidney or a heart, into us, we would reject it in a matter of minutes. So we’re actually adding a gene that inhibits the immune system right to the organ. And so ultimately now we’ve knocked out or deleted four pig genes and added six human genes”.

Many of the farm’s cloned pig eggs are eventually used to grow into genetically modified pigs, and they live in a highly secured lab. ABC News wasn’t allowed to see those pigs due to the stringent pathogen-free requirements. However, video provided by Revivicor shows what they say are the pigs in their air-conditioned pens, manned and cleaned around the clock by trained employees and veterinarians.