Baltimore, Europe Brief News – In unprecedented incident, a US 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig.
It is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being in unprecedented incident.
The breakthrough may lead one day to new supplies of animal organs for transplant into human patients.
The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“It was either die or do this transplant,” Mr Bennett explained a day before the surgery.
“I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” he said.
For the medical team, it marks the culmination of years of research and could change lives around the world.
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.
In October 2021, surgeons in New York announced that they had successfully transplanted a pig’s kidney into a person. At the time, the operation was the most advanced experiment in the field so far.
However, the recipient on that occasion was brain-dead with no hope of recovery.
