The doctors say that David Bennett, a 57-year-old patient, who had a terminal heart disease is now recovering after the treatment.
WASHINGTON: (UrduPoint/Pakistan Point News-Jan 11th, 2022) A man underwent heart surgery and received genetically modified pig heart for the first time in the human history, the reports said on Tuesday.
A team of doctors performed the surgery at the University of Maryland Medicine in the United States.
The doctors said that new gene editing tools demonstrated the feasibility of a pig-to-human heart transplant.
The scientists hoped pig organs could help alleviate shortage of donors if proven successful.
David Bennett, a 57-year-old patient, had a terminal heart disease.
Dr Bartley Griffith, who surgically transplanted the pig heart into the patient, said that this was a breakthrough surgery and brought them one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis. There are simply not enough donor human hearts available to meet the long list of potential recipients.
Griffith said, “We are proceeding cautiously, but we are also optimistic that this first-in-the-world surgery will provide an important new option for patients in the future,”.
For David Bennett, a 57-year-old from Maryland, the heart transplant was his last option.
Bennett said that it was either die or do this transplant. He said he wanted to live and he knew it’s a shot in the dark, but it was his last choice. He expressed these words before undergoing surgery.
To move ahead with the experimental surgery, the university obtained emergency authorisation from the US food and Drug Administration on New Year’s Eve through its compassionate use programme.
Dr Muhammad Mohiuddin, who heads the University’s programme on xenotransplantation – transplanting animal organs into humans, said: “The FDA used our data and data on the experimental pig to authorise the transplant in an end-stage heart disease patient who had no other treatment options,”.
The reports said that Bennett’s genetically modified pig heart was provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Virginia. On the morning of the surgery, the transplant team removed the pig’s heart and placed it into a special device to preserve its function until the surgery.
Pigs have long been a tantalising source of potential transplants because their organs are so similar to humans.
Other organs from pigs being researched for transplantation into humans include kidneys, liver and lungs. Prior efforts at pig-to-human transplants have failed because of genetic differences that caused organ rejection or viruses that posed an infection risk.
A surgeon dressed in blue scrubs places a genetically-modified pig heart into a storage device at the Xenotransplant lab ahead of its transplant into a 57-year-old manSurgeon Dr Muhammad M Mohiuddin leads a team placing a genetically-modified pig heart into a storage device at the Xenotransplant lab before it was transplanted into David Bennett, a 57-year-old patient with terminal heart disease [University of Maryland school of Medicine via Reuters]. Scientists have tackled that problem by editing away potentially harmful genes.
In the heart implanted in Bennett, three genes previously linked with organ rejection were “knocked out” of the donor pig, and six human genes linked with immune acceptance were inserted into the pig genome.
Researchers also deleted a pig gene to prevent excessive growth of the pig heart tissue. The work was funded in part with a $15.7 million research grant to evaluate Revivicor’s genetically-modified pig hearts in baboon studies.
In addition to the genetic changes to the pig heart, Bennett received an experimental anti-rejection drug.
