New York, Europe Brief News – According to news sources, the death of a man who underwent a breakthrough transplant using a porcine heart may have been caused by a virus carried by the pig. Continue reading to learn more about the procedure and how the patient became infected with this Pig Virus.
Spread of Pig Virus after Pig Heart Transplant
A 57-year-old patient who lived two months after a pig heart transplant died of pig virus, his transplant surgeon said last month.
In January, a genetically engineered pig’s heart was transplanted into David Bennett, a handyman who was suffering from heart failure, at the University of Maryland medical center.
Bennett passed away in March, only a few weeks after his operation. His health had deteriorated over a few days, but the hospital gave no cause of death.
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Complications with the Pig Heart Transplant
It was discovered this month that the pig’s heart might have been contaminated with swine cytomegalovirus, which may have contributed to Bennett’s death, Bennett’s transplant surgeon, Bartley Griffith. According to MIT Technology Review, Griffith discussed the virus and physicians’ efforts to cure it in a webinar held by the American Society of Transplantation on April 20.
According to Griffith, “We are starting to discover why he passed away.” He said, “[the virus] could be the actor, or might be the actor, that kicked this entire thing off.”
According to specialists in the field, xenotransplantation, the practice of transplanting tissue from one species to another, was put to the test in this case. A “forced mistake” may have caused the experiment to fail since the pigs raised for organ donation are intended to be virus-free.
It’s possible to avoid infections in the future if there was an illness, Griffith stated during the webinar.
Animal-to-human organ transplantation is hampered by the human immune system’s resilience, which may target foreign cells and generate a reaction that eventually destroys the transplanted organ or tissue in a process known as rejection.
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Consequently, businesses have begun genetically modifying pigs to hide their tissues from immune responses by deleting and inserting other genes. Revivicor, a biotechnology firm, performed ten gene alterations on a pig utilized in Bennett’s case.
Worries about a New Pandemic Spread
In spite of fears that xenotransplantation may lead to a global pandemic due to a virus adapting to human cells and spreading, doctors think that the virus in Bennett’s donor heart is not capable of infecting human cells.
No actual threat
It poses “no actual danger to humans,” says Jay Fishman, a transplant infection expert at Massachusetts General Hospital. The issue is that swine cytomegalovirus might cause responses that harm or kill the patient as well as the organ.
Experts are cautious to blame the Pig Virus for Bennett’s death. “This guy was very, very sick,” says Joachim Denner of the Free University of Berlin’s Institute of Virology.
