A historical procedure. A team of American surgeons have transplanted, for the first time in history, a genetically modified pig heart into a living human being. The patient has not rejected the organ and is being carefully monitored at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
A notable advance
More than six weeks ago, David Bennett, a 57-year-old man, was admitted to the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) with a life-threatening arrhythmia, a condition in which the heart beats irregularly. His condition required that he be placed on a cardiopulmonary bypass machine and put on the waiting list for a transplant . Instead, they used a heart from a genetically modified pig , making him the first human to receive one, according to a UMMC news release.
The procedure, which received the go-ahead from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on December 31, was the first in decades to attempt to transplant a heart into a human from another species. and the first such operation to use an engineered pig heart and avoid rejection by the human immune system.
Professor Bartley Griffith, director of the Centre’s heart transplant programme, described the patient as “awake, recovering and talking to his carers” in a video posted online this week.
The operation lasted eight hours, after removing four pig genes and adding six human genes to the donor pig heart. Preventing rejection by the recipient human organism has been the greatest challenge.
“This is the culmination of years of very complicated research to perfect this technique in animals with survival times in excess of nine months,” explains Muhammad Mohiuddin of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
