A 57-year-old man with a life-threatening heart disease became the first person to receive a heart from a genetically modified pig, according to The New York Times.
David Bennett Sr. of Maryland successfully underwent the first transplant of pig's heart into a human on Friday after an eight-hour operation in Baltimore. He was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
Dr. Bartley Griffith is the director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center and performed the surgery.
“It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,” Dr. Griffith said.
“It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before.”
Scientists have been working to develop a pig whose organs wouldn't be rejected by the human body. Thanks to the advancements in gene editing and cloning technologies, they have achieved their goal.
Researchers hope that the success of this procedure will lead the medical community into a new era in the future where replacement organs are no longer in a supply shortage.
41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ last year, with more than half receiving kidneys. 3,817 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, a new record.
There are more than half a million Americans on the waiting lists for kidneys and other organs. About a dozen people on the lists die each day due to the shortage of organs.
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“This is a watershed event,” Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician, said. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”
He added that many things must be accomplished medically before this procedure could be done often, pointing out that organ rejection still can occur on a well-matched human donor.
“Events like these can be dramatized in the press, and it’s important to maintain perspective,” Dr. Klassen said. “It takes a long time to mature a therapy like this.”
Mr. Bennet was kept alive before the procedure by a heart-lung bypass machine, and is still connected to it now. He was too sick to qualify for a human donor heart, and that's why he took the chance at the surgery.
"It was either die or do this transplant,” Mr. Bennett said. “I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice.”
Dr. Griffith offered the idea of doing the transplant with a pig's heart in mid-December, and even clarified that it would be a medical first.
“I said, ‘We can’t give you a human heart; you don’t qualify. But maybe we can use one from an animal, a pig,” Dr. Griffith said. “It’s never been done before, but we think we can do it.’”
“I wasn’t sure he was understanding me,” Dr. Griffith said. “Then he said, ‘Well, will I oink?’”
Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, VA, provided the genetically altered pig for the transplant. The FDA gave surgeons emergency authorization to do the operation on New Year's Eve.
“The anatomy was a little squirrelly, and we had a few moments of ‘uh-oh’ and had to do some clever plastic surgery to make everything fit,” Dr. Griffith said.
Luckily, “the heart fired right up” and “the animal heart began to squeeze.”
David Bennett Jr. was blown away when his father first told him about the transplant, and even thought he was going a bit crazy.
“At first I didn’t believe him,” the younger Mr. Bennett said. “He’d been in the hospital a month or more, and I knew delirium could set in. I thought, no way, shape or form is that happening.”
“I realized, ‘Man, he is telling the truth and not going crazy. And he could be the first ever.’”
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