The US man who had received a new heart from a genetically modified pig nearly six week ago died on Monday, University of Maryland Medical Centre officials have announced.
Lawrence Faucette (58) was the second patient at the medical centre to have had an ailing heart replaced with one from a pig that had been genetically modified so its organs would be more compatible with a human recipient and would not be rejected by the human immune system.
The first patient, David Bennett (57), died last year, two months after his transplant, reports The New York Times. He had developed multiple complications, and traces of a virus that infects pigs were found in his new heart.
Both patients had terminal heart disease when they received the transplanted organs, and neither managed to recover sufficiently to leave the hospital. But while Bennett did not show any signs of acute rejection of the new heart, which is the most significant risk in organ transplants, the medical team said Faucette’s transplanted heart had started to display some initial signs of rejection.
Dr Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who performed the transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore, said they mourned the loss of the patient.
Faucette was “very engaged in his own care, reading and interpreting his own biopsies”, said Dr Muhammad Mohiuddin, a professor of surgery and the scientific programme director of the cardiac xenotransplantation programme at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“His last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience, so others may be guaranteed a chance for a new heart when a human organ is unavailable,” Griffith said.
After the surgery, the transplanted heart performed well, with no signs of rejection during the first month, and Faucette had been able to do physical therapy with the aim of regaining his ability to walk.
Like Bennett, the first patient to receive a pig’s heart, Faucette had been rejected from transplant programmes that use a traditional organ from a deceased human donor. He was too sick, suffering from advanced heart failure as well as peripheral vascular disease and other complications.
He was in end-stage heart failure on 14 September when he was admitted to the Maryland Medical Centre, and shortly before the surgery, his heart stopped and he had to be resuscitated.
Transplant surgeons at a number of medical centres have been working fervently to advance the field of xenotransplantation.
Most of the work so far has involved transplanting kidneys from genetically modified pigs into brain-dead patients being maintained on ventilators, to demonstrate that the kidneys can make urine and perform other essential biological functions without being rejected.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Pig-heart transplant man making progress
Second pig-into-human heart transplant in US
World first: Transplant of pig heart on terminal US patient