The surgical team performed a pig heart transplant on a patient in Baltimore on Friday. The hospital said that he was doing well three days after the surgery.
Mark Teske is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
A Maryland hospital said Monday that a patient who underwent a pig heart transplant is doing well three days after the surgery.
It's too soon to know if the operation will work, but it's a step in the right direction. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center say that a heart transplant from a genetically modified animal can function in the human body.
The patient, David Bennett, was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant, and had no other choice but to accept the experiment, his son told The Associated Press.
It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. Bennett said a day before the surgery that he knew it was a shot in the dark, but he wanted to go ahead with it.
Scientists are trying to figure out how to use animal organs instead of human ones because of a huge shortage of human organs. There were a record number of heart transplants in the US last year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.
"If this works, there will be an endless supply of organs for patients who are suffering," said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university's animal-to-human transplant program.
Patients' bodies quickly reject animal organs, so prior attempts at such transplants have failed. Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart.
This time, the surgeons in Maryland used a pig's heart that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that was responsible for organ rejection.
The UNOS' chief medical officer said that the Maryland transplant was a watershed event.
It's only the first step in exploring if xenotransplantation can work again.
When a patient with a life-threatening condition has no other options, the FDA allows the surgery under what's called a "compassionate use" emergency authorization.
Researchers in New York performed an experiment on pigs that might offer promise for animal-to-human transplants. Doctors attached a pig's organ to a human body and watched it work.
The experiment at NYU Langone Health was led by Dr. Robert Montgomery.
"This is a truly remarkable breakthrough," he said. "As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough."
Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for the first clinical trials under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Maschke said that rushing into animal-to-human transplants without this information would not be advisable.
The surgery took seven hours.
David Bennett Jr. said that his father realized the magnitude of what was done. He could not live, or he could not last a day. We are in the unknown at this point.
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