A man with a life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.
It is the first successful pig heart transplant. The patient, David Bennett Jr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday after the eight-hour operation in Baltimore on Friday.
The director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center said that the operation creates the pulse, creates the pressure, and is his heart.
It looks normal. We don't know what will happen tomorrow. This is the first time it has been done.
More than 42,000 Americans received a transplant last year, and more than half of them received a new kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.
There is a shortage of organs and a lot of people die each day. More Americans received human donor hearts last year than ever before, but the 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. In New York, surgeons successfully attached a genetically engineered pig's kidneys to a brain-dead person.
When replacement organs are no longer in short supply for more than half a million Americans who are waiting for organs, researchers hope procedures like this will lead to a new era in medicine.
The chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing, who was formerly a transplant surgeon at the University of Maryland, said that the event was a landmark. Major changes in how we treat organ failure will be led by doors that are starting to open.
He said that there were many hurdles to overcome before the procedure could be broadly applied.
It is important to maintain perspective, as events like these can be dramatized in the press. It takes a long time to mature a therapy like this.
The image is.
The University of Maryland School of Medicine has a doctor who performed an operation on a man.
Mr. Bennett was too sick to qualify for a human donor heart, so he gambled on the experimental treatment, his family and doctors said.
His future is uncertain. Mr. 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.
The new heart is working and could be taken off the machine on Tuesday. Mr. 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 being monitored for infections, including porcine retroviruses, a pig virus that may be transmitted to humans, although the risk is considered low.
The University of Maryland Medical Center said that Mr. Bennett said before the surgery that it was either die or do the transplant. I want to live. I know it is a shot in the dark, but it is my last choice.
The experimental treatment was broached by Dr. Griffith in mid-December.
I told him that we couldn't give him a human heart. Maybe we can use one from a pig. It has never been done before, but we think we can do it.
I wasn't sure if he understood me. He asked if he would ink.
There is a long history of the process of sno-transplantation. Efforts to use the blood and skin of animals have been going on for hundreds of years.
Chimpanzees were used to transplant human organs, but the longest recipient lived was nine months. The baby known as Baby Fae died 20 days after the transplant of a baboon heart.
Adult human size can be achieved in six months with pigs, which is better than with primates. Some patients with diabetes have received porcine pancreas cells, and pig heart valves are routinely transplant into humans. Pig skin has been used to treat burn patients.
Gene editing and cloning have made pig organs less likely to be rejected by humans. The pig hearts were successfully transplant into baboons by Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, a professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Safety concerns and fear of setting off a dangerous immune response that can be life-threatening were the reasons why they were not used in humans until recently.
Dr. Jay Fishman, the associate director of the transplantation center at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that using pig organs provides the ability to perform genetic manipulations, the time to carry out better screening for infectious diseases, and the possibility of a new organ at the time that the patient needs it.
He said there are challenges and opportunities.
The image is.
The University of Maryland School of Medicine has a picture of David Bennett Jr. and Nicole McCray.
The pig's heart was provided by Revivicor, a company based in Blacksburg, Va.
There were 10 genetic modifications in the pig. A molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response is one of the genes knocked out.
The pig's heart was inactivated to prevent it from growing again after the transplant.
Six human genes were inserted into the pig's genome in order to make the pig's organs more compatible with the human immune system.
The team used a drug developed by Dr. Mohiuddin and made by Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals to suppress the immune system. The pig's heart was preserved until surgery with the use of a new machine perfusion device.
The transplant surgeons were given an emergency authorization by the FDA to operate on New Year's Eve.
The surgeons had a number of unexpected turns.
Dr. Griffith said that the anatomy was a little squirrelly and that they had to do some plastic surgery to make it fit. The animal heart began to squeeze as the team removed the restriction on blood supply to the organ.
When Mr. Bennett told his son about the transplant, he was confused.
The younger Mr. Bennett said he didn't believe him at first. He had been in the hospital for a month or more and I knew delirium could set in. I didn't think shape or form was happening.
He thought his father might be confused because he had a pig's valve about a decade ago. After a while, Mr. Bennett realized that he was telling the truth and not going crazy. He could be the first.
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