Doctors Transplant A Pig Heart Into A Human In World-First Operation

A man suffering terminal heart failure is now the first patient in the world to receive a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig. 

On Saturday, David Bennett was the brave patient willing to undergo the nine-hour experimental procedure at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. According to Daily Mail UK, surgeons said they used a heart taken from a pig that underwent some severe gene-editing to lessen the risk of Bennett’s immune system rejecting the vital organ. 

57-year-old Bennett is breathing all by himself and is still connected to a machine that’s designed to help his heart pump blood throughout his body. Surgeons and experts say that it’s still too early to tell if Bennett’s body will entirely accept the new heart, and the next few weeks will be crucial to examine his recovery while he’s taken off the machine. 

If the experimental surgery is successful, it will mark a tremendous medical breakthrough and milestone by validating that thousands of patients in the United States could be saved from death with help from animal organs. According to Daily Mail UK, doctors are calling Bennett’s procedure a “watershed event.”

Bennett was aware of the risk he was taking when undergoing the experimental surgery, but he was too sick to qualify for a human organ, so this was his last chance at life. One day before his surgery, Bennett said it was “either die or do this transplant.” He explained that he wanted to live, and he knows “it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” reports Daily Mail UK.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, there is a severe shortage of human organs donated for transplants. These shortages result in scientists experimenting with animal organs and testing how effective they can be inside humans.

About 120,000 Americans are currently in need of a healthy organ, and on average, 20 people die every day waiting for an organ to become available. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), in 2021, there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the United States. 

Many attempts at these animal organ transplants or xenotransplantation have failed because a patient’s body quickly rejects the animal organ. In one notable instance in 1984, “Baby Fae” was born with a rare heart condition and received a baboon heart, which failed after 21 days.