This world premiere took place in Maryland, on a 57-year-old man who received an organ from a genetically modified pork. A major advance for a solution, facing the shortage
Le Monde with AFP
American surgeons managed to graft on a patient a heart from a genetically modified pork, a world premiere, announced Monday, January 10 the medical school at the University of Maryland. The operation was conducted on Friday and allowed for the first time that an animal heart could continue to operate within a human without immediate reject, explained the institution in a statement.
David Bennett, 57, who received the porcine heart, had been declared ineligible to receive a human transplant. It is now closely followed by doctors to make sure the new organ works properly. “It was either death or this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s quite risky, but it was my last option,” said Maryland resident one day before his operation, according to the school of Medicine. “I can not wait to get out of my bed once I’ll be reinstated,” said Bennett, who spent the last houses bed and plugged into a machine that kept it alive.
Genetically modified pork
The US Medicines Agency (FDA) gave its green light to the New Year’s Eve surgery. “It’s a major surgery and that we close a little more than one solution to The bodies’ shortage, “commented Bartley Griffith, who realized the transplantation. The pork from which the heart comes has been genetically modified to no longer produce a type of sugar present normally on all the cells of the pigs and which causes an immediate release of the organ.
This genetic modification was carried out by the revivor company that had also provided a pork kidney that surgeons had successfully connected to a patient’s blood vessel in New York in October. Nearly 110,000 Americans are currently on waiting list for an organ transplant and more than 6,000 people who needed a transplant die each year in the country.
Xenografts – of an animal to a human – are not new. The doctors have tried transplants between species since at least the 17 e century, the first experiments focusing on primates. In 1984, a baboon heart had been transplanted on a baby but the little one, nicknamed “Baby Fae” had survived only 20 days.