Funded by $2.7 million from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Linda Sher, MD, is collaborating with Renovate Biosciences to develop a new source of organs for transplantation — immunologically modified human livers grown in pigs.

Sher, who is chief of clinical research in the Keck School of Medicine of USC’s Department of Surgery, is driven by the urgent shortage of donated organs for transplant in the United States. In 1992, she participated in the first known surgical attempt to transplant a pig liver into a human patient. Although a human liver could not be transplanted into the patient in time, the pig liver kept them alive for 36 hours.

To learn more about Sher and the project, click here.