“ Jean-François is 70 years old and has been on dialysis for four years. Four hours, three times a week, hooked up to the machine. He waits for the call, but he says that at his age they'll never call him.“,” says Hervé Ancelet, regional president of the patient association France Rein in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. Like Jean-François, nearly 23,000 people in France anxiously await a call informing them that a compatible organ donor has been found. But only 6,000 receive transplants each year. To address this shortage, efforts are increasing to make pig organs transplantable. But although it raises enthusiasm and hopes, xenotransplantation – transplanting from one species to another – involves overcoming numerous scientific, medical, ethical, and legal challenges, as highlighted by experts from the national Xenocure consortium during a half-day of roundtables.
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