From quantum computing and mRNA therapeutics to artificial-intelligence-powered climate modelling, here are seven technologies that Nature will be keeping its eye on.
Xenotransplantation
Every day, around two dozen people die awaiting an organ transplant in the 46 countries of the Council of Europe, together with 13 in the United States. The real toll might be higher still: according to Alexandre Loupy, a nephrologist at Necker Hospital in Paris, “many patients with terminal organ failure are not even wait-listed”.
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Xenotransplantation — replacing damaged human tissues with counterparts from closely related animal species — offers a tantalizing alternative to precious human organs. But such transplants tend to fail quickly, with the remarkable exception of one woman who survived nine months after receiving a chimpanzee kidney in 1964.
The problem is immune rejection. Pig cells, for instance, are coated with a carbohydrate, called alpha-gal, that triggers a strong immune reaction in humans, who lack this molecule. Precision genome editing with CRISPR–Cas9 has given scientists an effective tool for eliminating this and other sources of rejection and, in combination with next-generation immunosuppressants, this tool is hugely improving patient outcomes.
In 2024, clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston teamed up with xenotransplantation company eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to perform the first transplant of a pig kidney into a living person1. The kidney came from an animal with 69 genomic modifications to knock out immunity-triggering antigens and dormant viral sequences while also inserting human genes that reduce inflammation and prevent abnormal blood clotting. The patient survived for 52 days before dying from unrelated cardiac issues. Subsequent pig-kidney recipients in the United States and China remained stable for more than eight months before returning to dialysis — nearly matching 1964’s durability record.
The first transplant of an engineered pig heart into a person, in 2022.Credit: University Of Maryland School Of Medicine/ZUMA/Alamy
And it’s not just kidneys. In 2022, Muhammad Mohiuddin, a surgeon at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, and his colleagues described the first transplant of an engineered pig heart into a person, who survived for 60 days after surgery2. And in 2025, teams in China reported xenotransplantation of pig liver3 and even lung4 into people who had been declared brain dead — a key step towards working with recipients capable of recovery.
Even a transient xenograft could buy precious time for patients awaiting a human donor, but with a deeper understanding of individual determinants of transplant rejection, these substitutes could become a long-term solution, says Leonardo Riella, chair of transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital and one of the leads on the 2024 kidney transplant. “The xenotransplant really permits us to think outside the box and personalize that kidney and make it invisible to your immune system,” he says.
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