Key Points
A 58-year-old man has become the second person ever to receive a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig..
The patient, Lawrence Faucette, was facing near death from heart failure and wasnt eligible for a traditional transplant with a human organ.. So surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center gave him the option of receiving a highly experimental procedure that has only been tried once before..
We know from primate experiments when porcine cytomegalovirus gets activated in xenografts in baboons that bad things happen to the baboon and bad things happen to the xenograft, says Richard Pierson, who is the scientific director of the Center for Transplantation Sciences at Massachusetts General Hospital and wasnt involved in the heart transplants...
The next few weeks will be crucial to determine whether the transplanted pig heart will continue to function normally. Im hopeful that this will be the correct regimen for the patient and that he will be able to live a long life with the xenograft, says Jayme Locke, an abdominal transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who wasnt involved in the heart cases..
This process, which was also used for Bennetts transplant, is applied when an unapproved medical productin this case, the genetically modified pig heartis the only option for a patient with a serious or life-threatening condition.. Pierson thinks these individual cases of pig-to-human transplants will help generate evidence needed for more formal clinical trials that will include multiple patients..
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01, Nov, 23A 58-year-old man named Lawrence Faucette, who was suffering from heart failure and disqualified from a conventional heart transplant, underwent a unique procedure on September 20. In this experimental surgery, he was the recipient of a genetically altered pig heart. During the initial month following the surgery, the pig heart seemed to perform adequately. Nevertheless, rejection symptoms became evident in recent days, ultimately resulting in Faucette's unfortunate demise on Monday.
The Second Person to Get a Pig Heart Transplant Just Died
01, Nov, 23Lawrence Faucette died six weeks after undergoing the experimental procedure involving a genetically engineered pig organ.