It is a world premiere and especially a major surgical advance which opens new horizons as to the shortage of organs.
American surgeons have managed to graft on a 57 -year -old patient, a heart from a genetically modified pork, announced, this Monday, January 10, 2022 the school of medicine at the University of Maryland.
“The operation was carried out on Friday and made it possible to show for the first time that an animal heart could continue to operate within a human without immediate rejection,” the institution said in a press release.
David Bennett, 57, who received the pig heart, had been declared ineligible to receive a human transplant. He is now closely followed by doctors to ensure that his new body is working properly.
Transplantation was carried out by surgeon Bartley Griffith. According to the latter, it is “a major surgical advance and which still brings us closer to a solution to the shortage of organs”.
He explained that the pork from which the grafted heart comes has been genetically modified to no longer produce a type of sugar normally present on all the pork cells and which causes an immediate rejection of the organ.
This genetic modification, made by Revivicor company, had already been made on a pork kidney that surgeons had successfully connected to the blood vessels of a patient in brain death in New York in October.
The transplantation of the pig heart was however possible thanks to new experimental medication and several other usual anti-rejection drugs, to inhibit the immune system and prevent the body from rejecting the organ.
