According to a Maryland hospital, the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died.

 

The first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, the Maryland hospital that performed the surgery reported on Wednesday, two months after the pioneering procedure.

On Tuesday, 57-year-old David Bennett died at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Doctors did not specify the reason of death, just stating that his condition had been deteriorating for several days.

Bennett's son expressed gratitude to the hospital for offering the last-ditch trial, noting that the family hoped it would aid future efforts to alleviate the organ scarcity.

"We are grateful for every innovative moment, every wild dream, and every sleepless night that went into this historic effort," University of Maryland School of Medicine Dean David Bennett Jr said in a statement. "We hope that this story is only the beginning of a new era of hope, rather than the end."

For decades, doctors have hoped to employ animal organs in life-saving transplants. Bennett, a handyman from Hagerstown, Maryland, was only a candidate for this latest attempt because he was otherwise doomed, ineligible for a human heart transplant, bedridden and on life support, and without any other choices.

Bennett's son told the Associated Press after the operation on January 7 that his father realized there was no assurance it would work.

Attempts at such transplants, known as xenotransplantation, have previously failed, owing to patients' bodies' fast rejection of the animal organ. The Maryland doctors utilized a heart from a gene-edited pig this time.

Scientists altered the animal by removing pig genes that cause hyper-rapid rejection and replacing them with human ones that assist the body accept the organ.

The pig heart was initially functional, and the Maryland hospital sent periodic reports indicating that Bennett was steadily recovering. Last month, the hospital posted video of him watching the Super Bowl while working with his physical

Bennett lived far longer with the gene-edited pig heart than Baby Fae, a dying California newborn who lived 21 days with a baboon's heart in 1984, one of the last breakthroughs in xenotransplantation.

"We are heartbroken by Mr Bennett's death. In a statement, Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the surgery at the Baltimore hospital, stated, "He proved to be a brave and valiant patient who fought all the way to the end."

Another source of organs is desperately needed. Last year, almost 41,000 transplants were performed in the United States, a new high, with roughly 3,800 heart transplants. However, over 106,000 people are still on the national waiting list, hundreds die each year while waiting for an organ, and many more never receive one.

The spectacular Maryland experiment was permitted by the Food and Drug Administration under "compassionate use" restrictions for emergency situations. Bennett's doctors diagnosed him with heart failure and an erratic heartbeat, as well as a history of disobeying medical orders. He was ruled ineligible for either a human heart transplant, which necessitates the usage of immunosuppressive medications, or an implanted heart pump, which is the only other option.

Bennett's death was not caused by a specific reason, according to doctors. Transplant recipients are at risk of rejection, infection, and other problems.

But, according to Dr Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university's animal-to-human transplant program, "we have gained invaluable insights learning that the genetically modified pig heart can function well within the human body while the immune system is adequately suppressed."

The next question is whether scientists have learnt enough from Bennett's experience and other recent studies with gene-edited pig organs to persuade the FDA to allow a clinical trial with an organ that is not instantly lethal if it fails, such as a kidney.

Last year, doctors at New York University received permission from the families of deceased people to briefly link a gene-edited pig kidney to blood veins outside the body and observe how they functioned before turning off life support. In a step-by-step rehearsal for a surgery they intend to undertake in living patients later this year, doctors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham transplanted a pair of gene-edited pig kidneys into a brain-dead man.

Pigs have been utilized in human medicine for a long time, including pig skin grafts and pig heart valve implantation. Transplanting complete organs, on the other hand, is far more difficult than using highly processed tissue. Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics, donated the gene-edited pigs utilized in these tests. Revivicor is one of several biotech companies competing to generate appropriate pig organs for prospective human transplant.