Canadian and U.S. farmers may get pigs resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) in the not-too-distant future, but the public has to accept the gene editing used to develop them.

The transplant came after about a decade of earlier studies and transplants by Wang and his team of gene-edited organs from pigs into monkeys, including a pig heart, kidney, cornea, and bone. The group also performed a skin transplant using gene-edit pig skin into a person with severe burns.

But Wang pointed to a potential next step in xenotransplantation — learning to transplant pig livers. His team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature that a pig liver transpla