![]() Still, Klassen cautioned that it’s only a first tentative step into exploring whether this time around, xenotransplantation might finally work. David Klassen, UNOS’ chief medical officer, said of the Maryland transplant. ![]() “I think you can characterize it as a watershed event,” Dr. Several biotech companies are developing pig organs for human transplant the one used for Friday’s operation came from Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics. The difference this time: The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university’s animal-to-human transplant program.īut prior attempts at such transplants - or xenotransplantation - have failed, largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. “If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. ![]() I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” Bennett said a day before the surgery, according to a statement provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.īiden heads to Mississippi town ravaged by deadly tornado “It was either die or do this transplant. The patient, David Bennett, a 57-year-old Maryland handyman, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told The Associated Press. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center say the transplant showed that a heart from a genetically modified animal can function in the human body without immediate rejection. While it’s too soon to know if the operation really will work, it marks a step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said Monday that he’s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery. Bennett’s son, David Bennett Jr., who was a child at the time of the stabbing, has said that he does not want to discuss his father’s past, and emphasized that his father was contributing to medical science by undergoing the experimental transplant and hoped to “potentially save patient lives in the future.” The victim, Edward Shumaker, spent two decades in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, and suffered numerous medical complications including a stroke that left him cognitively impaired before he died in 2007 at age 40, according to his sister, Leslie Shumaker Downey, of Frederick, Md. Bennett’s heart surgery in January, The Washington Post reported that he had a criminal record stemming from an assault 34 years ago, in which he repeatedly stabbed a young man in a fit of jealousy, leaving him paralyzed. surgeons said they hoped to launch a small clinical trial with live human patients by the end of the year. The kidneys functioned and produced urine for three days. In January, surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported that they had for the first time successfully transplanted kidneys from a genetically modified pig into the abdomen of a 57-year-old brain-dead man. New York surgeons announced in October that they had successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a brain-dead human patient, finding that the organ worked normally and produced urine for 54 hours. Scientists have been trying to produce pigs whose organs would not be rejected by the human body, a research effort that has picked up steam over the past decade because of new gene editing and cloning technologies. About 3,800 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but demand remains high. David Bennett, via Associated Pressīut there is a dire shortage of organs, and a dozen or more people on waiting lists die each day. Bennett, center, with his children David Bennett Jr., left, and Nicole McCray in 2014.
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