“Ten years ago … I wouldn’t say I had high hopes it was actually going to work,” says Erik Finger, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota who co-led the work. “After we did the last transplant, I walked out of the room and said, ‘This is a big deal.’” The research was shared at the preprint server bioRxiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The kidneys aren’t perfect, and the researchers have yet to demonstrate that they can sustain life over the long term. But the results represent a milestone achievement, say others in the field.

“Thank God that someone’s actually managed to do it in one organ and prove that it works,” says Peter Kilbride, a cryobiologist and cofounder of Kyros Kairos, a company focused on improving funding for cryopreservation research, who was not involved in the research. “For years, people have been trying and failing to get to this step. Finally, we’ve got this breakthrough.”

“Their work is amazing and will enable us to truly, indefinitely bank organs,” says Korkut Uygun, a biomedical engineer and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, who was also not involved in the research. “It is a revolutionary time for transplantation.”

Buying time

Every year, tens of thousands of organ transplants take place in the US alone. These procedures are thought to have saved 2 million years of life in the last 25 years. But there’s plenty of room for improvement.

One major challenge is the lack of available organs. Even when an organ becomes available, it can be difficult to get it to the right recipient within 24 to 36 hours, which is the current limit for preserving human organs.

People who receive organ transplants must also take drugs that suppress their immune systems for the rest of their lives. These drugs are meant to stop their bodies from rejecting the new organs. But they come with side effects and increase the risk of infections and cancer.

The ability to bank organs for long periods of time holds the promise to address all these challenges. Doctors would have more time to match organs to recipients. They’d be able to limit the risk of organ rejection, too—potentially by preparing recipients, and their immune systems, beforehand.