Man who received the first pig and human kidney transplant reveals how controversial procedure saved his life
A man who received the first human and pig kidney transplant, has revealed his experience, and just how the strange operation saved his life.
It’s not often someone can say they’re part-animal, but for nearly a whole year, Tim Andrews had the right to say just that.
The 67-year-old New Hampshire man underwent a controversial treatment after a gruelling two years of living with kidney failure caused by his diabetes.
The man had to endure dialysis six hours a day to act as a blood filtration system in place of his kidneys.
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But after six months of being confined to a chair, he had a heart attack, leading him to look for alternative solutions.
That’s when he came across an article about a man who had received a transplant of a genetically modified pig organ in 2024. This is a discovery that ‘saved’ his life, leading to him eventually getting a human kidney too.
In a Facebook message to his human donor's family, he wrote: “I am so sorry for your loss.
“I grieve with you. It's got to tear you apart, but I’m here to tell you, the donation of a kidney has saved my life, and you have given hope to millions. Your family member is a hero. He’s a hero, not just to me, but to the entire world.”
He added: “I’ll never be able to repay you, but I promise you it’ll be in my heart. And it will be cared and loved for for as long as I live, and I will spend my life basically preaching, and I’m not a preacher, about what this love did.”
As for the first transplant – a pig kidney – Andrews learned about it after reading about Richard Slayman, who had his operation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
While successful, he sadly died after a cardiac event just two months later per the BBC.
However, doctors assured that the kidney was in good working order at the time.
When Andrews approached the hospital to consider him as a candidate for the xenotransplantation, a process of merging human and animal cells – such as transplanting animal organs into a person – they said he had to go through months of physical therapy to reduce the risk of his body rejecting the new organ.
After doing so, he was able to have the three-hour operation on January 25, 2025.
Andrews was sent home after a week and instructed to take 51 different medications to boost his immune system so he could keep the pig kidney integrated into his system.
But just months later, the father-of-two started showing signs of rejecting the kidney, which he named ‘Wilma’.
According to the American Kidney Fund, signs of rejection include things like a fever, feeling tired, gaining weight, swelling at the ankles, having a high blood pressure and urinating less.
Living with a dysfunctional kidney is detrimental to a person’s health and is deadly without fast intervention.
So, after a record number of days with a pig kidney inside of him (271), Wilma was removed in October of the same year.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Andrews said: “For 271, days, we fought it and fought it and fought it.”
“I knew probably a week before they're going to take it out, that she [Wilma] was done. She was done fighting.”
After she was out, Andrews was back on dialysis, which made him ‘sick all the time’.
But that would all change when on January 12, 2026, he was told there was a human kidney waiting for him – making him the first person to ever have a human transplant after an animal transplant.
However, it’s not been an easy road as he’s now on 20 anti-rejection medications and has to track his blood sugar due to the impact the transplant has on his insulin production.
But he said things will be ‘good’ soon.
Britt Jones