Potential organ donors are screened for viruses, bacteria and other infections, but rabies isn’t usually among those tests.

Chinese researchers are reporting new steps in the quest for animal-to-human organ transplants – with a successful pig kidney transplant and a hint Wednesday that pig livers might eventually be useful,

Doctors in China have become the first to report details about a transplant of a genetically modified pig liver into a human.

The transplant came after about a decade of earlier studies and transplants by Wang and his team of gene-edited organs from pigs into monkeys, including a pig heart, kidney, cornea, and bone. The group also performed a skin transplant using gene-edit pig skin into a person with severe burns.