US pig heart transplant recipient dies after 2 months

On Wednesday, March 9th, doctors at a Maryland hospital announced the death of the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig.


57-year-old David Bennett lived for two months after the groundbreaking experimental surgery at the University of Maryland Medical Center and died on Tuesday. Doctors and researchers said that his condition had begun deteriorating several days earlier, but the direct cause of his death is yet unknown.


Researchers are planning to do an autopsy later and post the result in their study.


Bennett’s son praised the hospital for offering the last-ditch experiment, saying the family hoped it would help further efforts to end the organ shortage.


“We are grateful for every innovative moment, every crazy dream, every sleepless night that went into this historic effort,” David Bennett Jr. said in a statement released by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, “We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end.”


“This was a first step into uncharted territory,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, a transplant surgeon who received his own heart transplant. He added “a tremendous amount of information” will contribute to the next steps as teams at several transplant centers plan the first clinical trials.


“I think it was an Incredible feat that he was kept alive for two months and was able to enjoy his family,” Montgomery said.


Bennett, a handyman from Hagerstown, Maryland, was a candidate for this newest attempt only because he otherwise faced certain death – ineligible for a human heart transplant, bedridden and on life support, and out of other options.


Prior attempts at such transplants have failed largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. But this time, the Maryland surgeons used a heart from a gene-edited pig – certain pig genes are gotten rid of, so that these pigs cannot produce the α-gal that triggers hyper-fast rejection from the human body.


At first the pig heart was functioning, and the Maryland hospital issued periodic updates that Bennett seemed to be slowly recovering. Last month, the hospital released a video of him watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed while working with his physical therapist.


Right now, more than 106,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, thousands die every year before getting an organ and thousands more never even get added to the list, considered too much of a long shot.


“We continue to be extremely optimistic that we’re going to be able to solve this problem, of the organ shortage and the fact that 6,000 people die every year waiting for a transplant, through xenotransplantation,” Montgomery said.


SMG News、 ShanghaiEye.com Yi Pan, Meixing Ren Contributed to this article
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