A team of South Korean scientists has successfully transplanted a pig's heart into a monkey which survived for a record 51 days.

According to the National Institute of Animal Science, a research arm of the Rural Development Administration, the crab-eating macaque monkey remained healthy for 51 days after the transplant of the heart and the cornea of the pig called Mideumi. With this success, the country broke its earlier record of a successful xenotransplantation which lasted for 43 days, according to Yonhap news agency.

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The pig's heart was first genetically modified to cause an excessive production of membrane cofactor protein. This was important to reduce the risk of the organ being rejected after transplantation.

Oh Sung-jong, the head of the institute, is confident about securing a superior position in xenotransplantation globally and taking it further to humans because a pig's heart resembles that of a human a lot biologically. The institute also intends to work with a bioengineering company to perform a transplant of pancreatic islets from pigs to monkeys with the hopes of finding methods to eventually treat human diabetes patients in the future.

A similar experiment was done on a baboon in which a pig's heart was able to survive for a long period of more than two years in the baboon's abdomen. Although the baboon had its own heart in the place beating normally, the success of keeping alive a xenotransplanted heart was an unprecedented one.

According to a study, a record 22 people die every single day in the US in need of an organ transplant.

"People used to think that this was just some wild experiment and it has no implications," lead researcher Muhammad Mohiuddin told Science. "I think now we're all learning that xenotransplantation in humans can actually happen."