Much like sushi or political humor, badly needed donor organs tend to have a pretty short shelf life. By current estimates, vital organs like a heart or a lung need to be transplanted into their waiting human recipient within six hours or less, while the most hardy of these organs, the kidney, can only remain viable for up to 36 hours before surgery.

These unforgiving expirations dates have helped keep over 100,000 Americans (and counting) stuck on the waiting list for a new organ—but surgeons and medical researchers at the University of Minnesota have just reported a breakthrough that might finally get this line moving. A university team, co-led by transplant surgeon Erik Finger, says it has effectively kept pig kidneys in cold storage for months, and in one case over a year, managing to gently thaw, test, and successfully transplant these warmed-over organs into test pig recipients.

The research, published as a pre-print with bioRxiv while it awaits peer review, confirmed that the once-frozen organs had both regained their color and helped the test pigs produce urine: critical signs that restored blood flow and organ function had been achieved.

“Ten years ago […] I wouldn’t say I had high hopes it was actually going to work,” Finger told MIT Technology Review on Thursday. “After we did the last transplant, I walked out of the room and said, ‘This is a big deal.’”

The University of Minnesota team’s long path to this latest milestone in surgery and cryopreservation included smaller successful tests with rat kidney transplants published in 2023 and a prior pig kidney transplant involving a much shorter freezing period (10 days) back in 2025.

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