Kidney transplant pioneer Tim Andrews seeks lifesaving donation

Tim Andrews pulled a black jacket over his 2002 Patriots Super Bowl t-shirt and greeted another patient waiting in a wheelchair by the door of the dialysis center.

“Hey, how you doing, brothah,’ he said in his classic New Hampshire vernacular.

Andrews was a bit shaky after spending another cold Tuesday morning in a recliner in a ground-floor treatment room in Concord, with a machine filtering the waste and toxins from his blood through a tube in his arm. Low blood pressure is an increasingly common thing for him, especially right after dialysis. He’s had multiple heart attacks.

When he got back to his condo, he was wiped. The remainder of his day belonged to rest and recovery.

Except for a nine-month stint earlier this year, this is how Andrews spends three mornings a week, and has for the last few years.

This past spring and summer, Andrews took walks with his dog around the block. He cooked at home and planted bulbs in his garden, just like many of his retired friends in Concord.

“I had time to smell the roses,” he said.

It was all thanks to a genetically-altered pig kidney that Andrews received in a transplant in January. He named it Wilma.

While Andrews and Wilma eventually had to part ways, his story is one of success. His nine-month stint broke the record for a transplanted animal kidney. While that new life had its complications – including multiple hospital stays – Andrews was able to return to many of the daily pleasures he had long lost to end-stage kidney disease.

When his body eventually rejected the pig kidney, “I asked if I could have another one,” he said, with a laugh. “They said ‘no.’”

While Andrews’ transplant journey was ground-breaking, he’s now back in the same place as before: enduring the relentless cycles of dialysis and hoping for a lifesaving donor, soon.

He can feel his health fading, and knows he doesn’t have a ton more time.

‘Wears you down’

Andrews worked at Shaw’s for 33 years after graduating Concord High in 1976 and later NHTI. He was diagnosed with stage-three kidney disease in 2023. It progressed quickly, and he went on dialysis two months later.

Based on where his name was on a list and his type O blood – universal donor, narrow receiver – Andrews was told that seven years stood between him and a human transplant. He was also told he likely had about five years to live, dependent on dialysis. It was a grim arithmetic.

Even more grim was the idea of undergoing years of endless treatment. He could count four fellow patients he had befriended, people who had been on dialysis for years, who’d decided to stop. They just couldn’t do it anymore.

“I don’t know if people know how bad it is,” Andrews said. “It just wears you down.”

Andrews set his sights on finding other options, on anything that might mean he wouldn’t have to “sit there in a chair and wait to die.”

He’d heard about Richard Slayman, a Mass. man who became the first living recipient of a pig kidney in March 2024 through Massachusetts General Hospital, though he died a few months later from apparently unrelated heart complications. Andrews reached out to doctors there and pushed to be put in the program.

“People think I was picked out of a hat or something like that,” he said. “I stood in their offices and said ‘I’m 100% in on this. Whatever you want to do to me to learn something, I’m good with that. If I die one day in, and you learn something, I’ll feel it was a success.’”

Xenotransplant research– using genetically modified animal organs, often pigs, as donors – is gaining steam, though not without critics who raise questions about the ethics and risks. Concerns exist about animal rights and the spread of disease to humans.

Andrews is the third person to receive a pig kidney after Slayman, and one of two currently living. In the last few years, surgeons across the world have moved forward with xenotransplants of pig hearts, livers and lungs, in the hope of someday being able to lower the number of people who die each year awaiting organ donors. So far, most xenotransplants have failed after a few months.

Mass General is continuing its xenotransplant work, with another kidney implementation in the works.

Preparing for his transplant took months. Andrews got special vaccinations, saw specialists, signed release forms, exercised and underwent countless tests. Finally, a surgery date was set for January 25, 2025.

He was told by his medical team that he ought to name his new kidney. While the pig it had come from was named after one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – he’s pretty sure it was Leonardo – Andrews settled on Wilma. He just liked the name.

The kidney came from a Cambridge-based company called eGenesis, which uses CRISPR gene-editing technology to remove characteristics that are risky or could spread disease to humans while also tailoring other traits to make the organ more human-like. Xenotransplant patients also follow novel immunosuppressant therapies in the hopes of staving off organ rejection.

From the moment he woke up from surgery, Andrews felt different. He had an energy he hadn’t felt in years, and joked about tap dancing across his hospital room. Part of that was painkillers, he noted, but it never waned.

Enjoying life

Not everything about life with Wilma was easy.

A handful of “minor rejections” of the new kidney meant multiple weeks-long stays back in the hospital. In Andrews’ case, a pig kidney also meant urinating three times the volume of the average person – and having to hydrate relentlessly to keep up. Medication dosages that were calibrated for human transplants had to be tweaked and adjusted for what an animal kidney would process.

In between all of that, Andrews said, he was reunited with many of the small daily habits that the exhaustion of dialysis had wilted.

When at home in Concord, where he’d lived his entire life, Andrews walked almost daily. He went for long drives. He visited a small camp he owns on Barrington’s Long Pond.

“I sat there and looked at the water,” he said. “I really just enjoyed things. Anything. Everything.”

He could tell something was off when his doctors held him after a routine weekly blood test in October.

Under the hood, Andrews’ body was rejecting his new organ. The way he describes it, the kidney became “all clogged up.”

“I knew right off, I’m going back to dialysis,” he said. “So I was pretty depressed with that.”

At the same time, Andrews said he had gone in with no expectations beyond the first day of the transplant, he said.

“I went in thinking, I’m not going to make it through this, but you’re going to learn something,” he said.

He grew as a person during the last year, he said, becoming a spokesperson for people with kidney disease and a glimmer of hope for the other thousands of people waiting for transplants.

“I’m doing it for the thousands of people that are on dialysis,” he said. “Hopefully, at some point we’ll be able to take them off, and they will live a normal life, even if it’s for a year or two.”

‘Selfless medical pioneer’

Andrews was never a confident public speaker growing up. In his new life, he was featured on the podcast of CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. He threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game.

“I was just a little quiet guy from Concord, New Hampshire. I spend a lot of my time now, doing this,” he said, gesturing to reference the interview.

That advocacy isn’t just for people with his chronic disease, but for their families, too.

Andrews and his wife are separated. He said that’s relatively common among transplant patients.

The risks and medical rollercoaster, between the need for constant care while at home and the time spent away in hospitals under observation, he said, “It’s too much.”

“When they asked me what they could do to better the program, I told them, ‘You are great at taking care of the patient. You stink at taking care of the caregivers,” he said. “You’ve got to get them help. You’ve got to get them help.”

Improved support, whether for medical care or just tasks around the house, are among the things he hopes to pass down to future patients. He hopes, and expects, that others will soon shatter his 271 day record.

“Tim has been a selfless medical pioneer and an inspiration to patients with kidney failure around the world, and we extend to Tim our most heartfelt thanks for trusting the transplant clinical team with his care throughout this journey,” the hospital said in a statement when the kidney was removed in October. “Tim set a new bar in xenotransplantation.”

Andrews believes he will live to see a world where xenotransplants are a widespread treatment solution. Wilma remains under close study by eGenesis, Andrews said, so that scientists can learn about ways to better modify future pig organs to avoid failure.

In the meantime, though, he needs a human donor, he said – “Really bad.”

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