Pig heart transplant helps save man’s life

IN A medical first, a pig heart has been transplanted into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life – with doctors yesterday saying he was doing well.

Scientists said the operation marked a ‘watershed’ moment in the decades-long quest to use animal organs for transplants.

Patient david Bennett, 57, was told there was no guarantee the experiment at the university of Maryland Medical Center in the uS would work.

But he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son said.

‘It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,’ Mr Bennett said a day before the surgery.

A huge shortage of human organs has driven scientists to figure out how to use animal organs instead. Last year, there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the uS, a record number, according

‘I know it’s a shot in the dark’

to the united Network for organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system.

‘If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,’ said dr Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university’s animal-to-human transplant programme. But prior attempts at such transplants – or xenotransplantation – have failed, largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart.

The difference with Friday’s operation was that 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 hyperfast organ rejection.

dr david Klassen, uNoS’ chief medical officer, said the Maryland transplant was ‘a watershed event’ but highlighted it was only a first, tentative step into exploring whether xenotransplantation might finally work.