Washington, United States:
A 58-year-old man this week became the second patient in the world to receive a genetically modified pig heart transplant, the latest milestone in a growing field of medical research.
Transplanting animal organs into humans, called xenotransplantation, could provide a solution to the chronic shortage of human organ donations. More than 100,000 Americans are currently on waiting lists for organ transplants.
Both heart procedures were carried out by experts from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, with the first patient dying last year two months after his transplant due to “a host of factors, including his poor health status” prior to the operation. said in a statement on Friday.
The latest surgery took place on Wednesday, with patient Lawrence Faucette ineligible for a donated human heart due to pre-existing vascular disease and complications from internal bleeding.
Without the experimental transplant, the father of two and a Navy veteran faced almost certain heart failure.
“My only real hope is to go for the pig heart, the xenotransplant,” Faucette said before the procedure. “At least now I have hope and I have a chance.”
After the transplant, Faucette was breathing on his own and the new heart was functioning well “without any assistance from assistive devices,” the university said.
He took conventional anti-rejection drugs and also received a new antibody therapy to prevent his body from damaging or rejecting the new organ.
Xenotransplants are challenging because the patient’s immune system will attack the foreign organ. Scientists are trying to get around the problem by using organs from genetically modified pigs.
In recent years, doctors have transplanted kidneys from genetically modified pigs into brain-dead patients.
The NYU Langone Hospital Transplant Institute in New York announced this month that a pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead patient had functioned for a whopping 61 days.
Early xenotransplantation research focused on harvesting organs from primates. For example, in 1984, a baboon heart was transplanted into a newborn baby known as “Baby Fae”, but she survived for only 20 days.
Current efforts are focused on pigs, which are thought to be ideal donors for humans because of their organ size, their rapid growth and large litters, and the fact that they are already raised as a food source.
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