A US man, David Bennett, 57, has become the first person in the world to get a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig.
The eight-hour groundbreaking procedure, which took place in Baltimore on Friday, is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being.
Mr. Bennett was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart.
“It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before,” said Dr. Bartley Griffith, the director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center, who performed the operation.
Surgeon Griffith said the surgery would bring the world “one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis”, the University of Maryland School of Medicine said in a release. That crisis means that 17 people a day in the US die waiting for a transplant, with more than 100,000 reportedly on the waiting list.
The possibility of using animal organs for so-called xenotransplantation to meet the demand has long been considered, and using pig heart valves is already common.
Last year, some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ, more than half of them receiving kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that coordinates the nation’s organ procurement efforts.
But there is an acute shortage of organs, and about a dozen people on the lists die each day. Some 3,817 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but the potential demand is still higher.
Scientists have worked feverishly to develop pigs whose organs would not be rejected by the human body, research accelerated in the past decade by new gene editing and cloning technologies.
The heart transplant comes just months after surgeons in New York successfully attached the kidney of a genetically engineered pig to a brain-dead person.
Researchers hope procedures like this will usher in a new era in medicine in the future when replacement organs are no longer in short supply for the more than half a million Americans who are waiting for kidneys and other organs.
“This is a watershed event,” said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”
