NYU Langone Health / AFP
NOS News•
Doctors in the United States have transplanted pig hearts for the first time in two brain-dead patients. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal. The operation took place at a teaching hospital in New York. The bodies were flown hundreds of kilometers into the city.
The patients are a 72-year-old man and a 64-year-old woman who both died of a heart attack. The two were pronounced brain dead, but kept on ventilators. As a result, the heart and lung functions remained intact, while the brain did nothing functionally. The relatives of the two donated the bodies to science.
The study lasted about three days. At that time, the organs were not rejected by the body, a major concern of physicians with such procedures. According to Ian Alwayn, professor of transplant surgery at Leiden University Medical Center, it is the first time that brain-dead patients have been given a modified heart from a pig.
However, three brain-dead patients have already received a pig kidney and a pig heart has also been inserted into a living patient. Before that time, such research focused exclusively on primate organs.
First pig heart recipient
According to The Wall Street Journal, researchers hope the transplants will provide more clarity about how modified pig hearts function in a human body. There is also a need to clarify how pig viruses can be prevented from being transferred to the human recipient.
In March, the first living recipient of a genetically modified pig heart died. The patient, 57-year-old David Bennett, had the organ inserted in Baltimore. Such an operation had never been performed before.
Initially, the operation seemed successful, but after two months Bennett’s condition suddenly deteriorated rapidly and he died. Presumably, Bennett died of a swine virus already present in the heart.
“The investigation into such surgeries continues,” Alwayn said. “You can also give an animal organ to both living and brain-dead patients.”
Watch images of Bennett’s surgery in January here:
A pig’s heart transplanted into a human for the first time
These studies have different goals. In brain-dead people, according to Alwayn, you can learn more about whether the organ is working and how any germs and viruses that may be present develop. “You also get more information about the immunological responses.”
It is safer than research in living patients. But there is also an ethical objection, says the professor. “Brain-dead patients can be observed in an ICU for a few days, at most weeks, but longer than that is ethically difficult to defend.”
That is different with living patients like Bennett. He suffered from serious cardiac arrhythmias and according to doctors his chances of survival without a transplant were nil. In addition, Bennett knew what he was getting into, the hospital said.
In patients like Bennett, researchers are learning more about the long-term effects of a transplant. “So the types of research answer different scientific questions,” Alwayn concludes.
Dilemma
The transmission of pig viruses during transplants leads to a dilemma: it can lead to new types of infections in humans, but at the same time there is a major shortage of organ donors in America, for example. Xenotransplantation, or the use of genetically modified animal organs, may be a solution for this in the future.