Each year, more than 22,000 people are waiting for transplants, and only 6,000 are performed due to a lack of organs, according to the French Biomedicine Agency. These long delays force some patients to wait up to 3 or 4 years, or even longer depending on the type of transplant requested, sometimes resulting in the patient's death. To overcome the organ shortage, xenografting, the transplantation of a graft from a donor of a different species from the recipient, appears to be a solution.
In the field of xenotransplantation, France has always been in the race. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mathieu Jaboulay transplanted a goat organ into a woman for the first time. A few years later, the Franco-Russian Serge Voronoff also experimented with xenotransplantation using monkey testicular tissue in humans. These practices were halted due to failures caused by a strong immunological response, and concerns about the risks of viral transmission in the 1990s, particularly HIV, were a further discouragement.
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