Dunedin medical researcher Dr Duncan Adams, who is an honorary research fellow at the University of Otago Faculty of Medicine, is the first author of the article, published in international journal Autoimmunity Reviews.
His fellow authors are Prof John Knight, of the University of Otago, and Prof Alan Ebringer, of King's College, University of London.
The paper highlights the "neglected discovery" of Dr Henry Kaplan, the late leading US radiotherapist and researcher, who "revolutionised the treatment of Hodgkin's disease".
Dr Kaplan found that rats, after irradiation of all parts of their bodies that contained lymphoid tissue, would accept bone marrow from other rats.
Those rats whose immune system had been removed by radiation then became "blood system chimeras" - effectively "double animals"- which would then accept skin and heart grafts from the bone marrow donor strain, Dr Adams said.
"Today, the clinical application of this is to take and store bone marrow from the proposed graft recipient, then temporarily wipe out the graft recipient's immune system by irradiation or chemicals," he said.
The recipient would then be inoculated with both the recipient and donor bone marrow "before performing the transplantation, which will then not be rejected".
"Full exploration of this neglected discovery could transform the field of transplant surgery," he said.
"This procedure would enable pigs to be used for unlimited xenotransplantation."
The article says pigs, a domesticated meat animal of similar size to humans, are ideal organ donors for providing kidneys, hearts and pancreatic islets for man.
Such islets are cells in the pancreas that make insulin.
The researchers suggest that "for reassurance before trial in man", Dr Kaplan's studies could be repeated, "as an urgent research necessity".
There had been a "false fear" of the transplanting of pig organs into humans, after finding that a pig retrovirus could infect cultured human cells.
"However, pig heart valves have been used in hundreds of thousands of people in the USA, without trouble," the article noted.
During a long and distinguished medical research career, Dr Adams (86) has won international medical science prizes, including the Van Meter Prize of the American Goitre Association.
And he remains a busy researcher - "I'm flat out," he says - and has no plans to slow down.
Dr Adams was a long-serving director of the former Medical Research Council-funded Autoimmunity Research Unit at the Otago Medical School.
