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The Maryland hospital that performed the surgery announced on Wednesday that the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig died two months after the groundbreaking experiment.
David Bennett, 57, died Tuesday at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Doctors did not give an exact cause of death, only saying that his condition had worsened a few days ago.
Bennett’s son commended the hospital for presenting his last-ditch experiment and said he hoped it would help the family’s efforts to end the organ shortage.
“We are grateful for every innovative moment, every crazy dream, every sleepless night that went into this historic effort,” said David Bennett Jr. in a statement released by the University of Maryland School of Medicine. We hope this story will be the beginning of hope, not the end.”
For decades, doctors have been trying to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Bennett, a mechanic from Hagerstown, Maryland, was a candidate for this newest venture because he would otherwise face certain death—not fit for a human heart transplant, but bedridden and out of life support and other options.
After the January 7 operation, Bennett’s son told the Associated Press that his father knew there was no guarantee it would work.
Previous attempts at such transplants – or xenotransplantation – have largely failed because patients’ bodies quickly rejected the animal organ. This time, Maryland surgeons used a heart from a genetically engineered pig: The scientists modified the animal to remove the pig genes that trigger ultra-rapid rejection and add human genes to help the body accept the organ.
The pig’s heart was working at first, and the Maryland hospital released periodic updates showing Bennett’s slow recovery. Last month, the hospital released a video of him watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed while working with his physical therapist.
With the gene-edited pig heart, Bennett survived much longer than one of the final milestones in xenotransplantation—Baby Fae, a dying California baby, lived for 21 days with a baboon heart in 1984.
“The loss of Mr. Bennett has devastated us. Performing the surgery at Baltimore hospital, Dr. Bartley Griffith has proven himself to be a brave and noble patient who fought to the end.
The need for another organ source is enormous. More than 41,000 transplants were performed in the US last year, that’s a record – including about 3,800 heart transplants. But more than 106,000 people remain on the national waiting list, thousands die each year without ever gaining an organ, and thousands that are considered too long a possibility are never added to the list.
The Food and Drug Administration had authorized the dramatic Maryland experiment under “compassionate use” guidelines for emergencies. Bennett’s doctors said he had heart failure and an irregular heartbeat, as well as a history of not following medical instructions. A human heart that required strict use of immunosuppressive drugs or the remaining alternative, an implanted heart pump, was deemed unsuitable for a heart transplant.
Doctors did not reveal the exact cause of Bennett’s death. Rejection, infection and other complications pose risks for transplant recipients.
But building on Bennett’s experience, “we gained invaluable insights by learning that the genetically modified pig heart can function well in the human body when the immune system is sufficiently suppressed,” said Dr. Mohammed Mohiuddin. human transplant program
The next question is whether scientists have learned enough from Bennett’s experience and some other recent experiments with genetically modified pig organs to convince the FDA to allow a clinical trial — possibly with an organ like a kidney that isn’t immediately fatal if it fails. .
Twice last fall, surgeons at New York University obtained permission from families of deceased individuals to temporarily insert a gene-edited pig kidney into blood vessels outside the body and monitor their work before ending life support. And surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham went a step further and transplanted a pair of genetically modified pig kidneys into a brain-dead man in a step-by-step rehearsal of an operation they probably hoped to try on these later living patients. year.
Pigs have long been used in human medicine, including grafts of pig skin and implantation of pig heart valves. But transplanting whole organs is much more complicated than using highly processed tissue. The genetically modified pigs used in these experiments were supplied by Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics, one of several biotech companies working to develop pig organs suitable for potential human transplantation.
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science has support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. Only AP is responsible for all content.
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