A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.
It was the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being.
According to New York Times, the eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,” the Director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center, who performed the operation, Dr. Bartley Griffith said.
“It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before.”
Last year, some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ, more than half of them receiving kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that coordinates the nation’s organ procurement efforts.
But there was an acute shortage of organs, and about a dozen people on the lists die each day. Some 3,817 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but the potential demand is still higher.
Scientists have worked feverishly to develop pigs whose organs would not be rejected by the human body, research accelerated in the past decade by new gene editing and cloning technologies. The heart transplant comes just months after surgeons in New York successfully attached the kidney of a genetically engineered pig to a brain-dead person.
Researchers hope procedures like this would usher in a new era in medicine in the future when replacement organs are no longer in short supply for the more than half a million Americans who are waiting for kidneys and other organs.
“This is a watershed event,” the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician, Dr. David Klassen said.
“Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”
But he added that there were many hurdles to overcome before such a procedure could be broadly applied, noting that rejection of organs occurs even when a well-matched human donor kidney is transplanted.
“Events like these can be dramatized in the press, and it’s important to maintain perspective,” Klassen said. “It takes a long time to mature a therapy like this.”
Bennett decided to gamble on the experimental treatment because he would have died without a new heart, had exhausted other treatments and was too sick to qualify for a human donor heart, family members and doctors said.
His prognosis was uncertain. Bennett is still connected to a heart-lung bypass machine, which was keeping him alive before the operation, but that is not unusual for a new heart transplant recipient, experts said.
The new heart is functioning and already doing most of the work, and his doctors said he could be taken off the machine on Tuesday. Bennett is being closely monitored for signs that his body is rejecting the new organ, but the first 48 hours, which are critical, passed without incident.
He is also being monitored for infections, including porcine retrovirus, a pig virus that may be transmitted to humans, although the risk is considered low.
“It was either die or do this transplant,” Bennett said before the surgery, according to officials at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice.”
Griffith said he first broached the experimental treatment in mid-December, a “memorable” and “pretty strange” conversation.
“I said, ‘We can’t give you a human heart; you don’t qualify. But maybe we can use one from an animal, a pig,” Dr. Griffith recalled. “It’s never been done before, but we think we can do it.’”
“I wasn’t sure he was understanding me,” Griffith added. “Then he said, ‘Well, will I oink?’”
Xenotransplantation, the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues from animals to humans, has a long history. Efforts to use the blood and skin of animals go back hundreds of years.
