Thousands of patients worldwide are waiting for a potentially life-saving donor. Thousands of patients worldwide are waiting for a potentially life-saving donor. Doctors have developed an AI tool that could reduce wasted efforts to transplant organs by 60%. Thousands of patients worldwide are waiting for a potentially life-saving donor, and more candidates are stuck on waiting lists than there are available organs. Recently, in cases where people need a liver transplant, access has been expanded by using donors who die after cardiac arrest.

Scientists are already growing muscles, bones, and mini-organs in the lab. But these tissues are generally small, simple, and kinda wimpy. That's partly because a Petri dish is no match for the human body. Take, for example, skeletal muscle. Bioreactors--typically warm, moist vats where cells are grown--might induce some simple movements in lab-grown muscles, but it's nothing like the multidirectional bending and stretching of the human body, which helps our muscles grow and get stronger.

Martine Rothblatt, futurist and founder of Sirius XM, says by the time her biotech company's genetically modified transplant organs are in use, drones will likely deliver them. Rothblatt gave her view of the future at The Washington Post's Transformers conference Wednesday. Her United Therapeutics company, which has offices is Silver Spring, Md. and Research Triangle Park, N.C., is raising pigs with genome modifications its researchers hope will improve the animals' organs for transplant recipients. Pigs organs, because of their size and function, make good transplant material, but often the patient is trading their current disease for "a chronic organ rejection kind-of-disease that ultimately takes the life of many, if not most, people who receive transplants," she said. The company hopes to begin trials on organ transplants from genetically-modified pigs by the end of the decade, with regulatory approval ten years from now, Rothblatt said.