And NYU Langone Health Hospital Physician Team (New York, USA) has successfully transplanted hearts genetically modified pig to two recently deceased people who remained on life support with respirators, the center reported Tuesday.
Nader Moazami, the director of surgery for the heart transplants from that hospital, supervised the interventions held in June and July of this year in which the organs of the animals were integrated into two brain-dead donors and their operation was supervised for three days.
The experiment follows a similar one that was conducted last year at the University of Maryland, in which a genetically modified pig heart was implanted for the first time in a patient with terminal heart diseasebut who died 49 days later as his condition deteriorated.
According to the NYU Langone note, in these two xenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation) cases, no early signs of rejection were observed and the hearts functioned normally on standard post-transplant medication and without additional mechanical support.
Tzoonotic transmission of a porcine endogenous retrovirus
The process continued a new protocol for infectious diseases that ruled out the presence of a porcine virus (pCMV), while strict measures were also applied to prevent and monitor the potential zoonotic transmission of a porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV).
The director of the hospital’s Transplant Institute, Robert Montgomery, responsible for transplanting a modified pig kidney to a person who died at the end of last year, considered that Swine virus monitoring incorporated into this process has been a key element of its success.
The hearts of the pigs were of the Revivicor biotech company and had ten genetic modifications to prevent organ rejection, its abnormal growth in the body and incompatibilities between the animal and the human being.
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Montgomery said that studies with recently deceased donors are essential to gather the human-related data needed to advance a medical field that for decades, and until last year, he had only done experiments on primates.
The hospital noted that these Successful xenotransplantation represents an advance towards the development of a protocol that ensures an alternative supply of organs for people with deadly heart disease, right at a time of organ shortages in the United States.