A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig.
Gatekeepers News reports that the groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being.
The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore, United States, 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.
The director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical centre, who performed the operation, Bartley Griffith, said, “It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart.
“It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before.”
Scientists have worked feverishly to develop pigs whose organs would not be rejected by the human body. Research accelerated in the past decade by new gene editing and cloning technologies.
The heart transplant comes just months after surgeons in New York successfully attached the kidney of a genetically engineered pig to a brain-dead person.
