The patient was 57-year-old David Bennett, who was in a desperate condition due to heart disease. Either die or have this transplant, he said before the surgery
David Bennet had no alternative: to die or accept a type of transplant never done before. He chose the second option and today this 57-year-old American became the first man in the world with a pig heart genetically modified.
Desperate conditions
Three days after the operation, performed by the doctors ofUniversity of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, he is fine, breathing alone and hoping to continue living his life, even if it is premature to make predictions at the moment. The doctors obtained special permission from the US regulatory authorities to put this new procedure into practice precisely because the patient would otherwise have had no chance of surviving: in the six weeks prior to the transplant, he was unconscious and was connected to machinery. who kept him alive after he was diagnosed with terminal heart disease. In those conditions, doctors do not perform a classic donor organ transplant, given the poor chance of patient survival, and so they proposed the use of one xenotrapianto (precisely with an animal organ).
The technique used
a first step towards solving the organ shortage problem, commented Bartley Griffith, one of the surgeons who performed the surgery. For some time, researchers have been following the path of genetic manipulation of pig organs (the animal closest to man due to the characteristics of its immune system, so much so that pig heart valves to be transplanted into humans), manipulation today made easier thanks to the new technique of cut and sew DNA (CRISPR, we talked about it HERE, ed) which allows to eliminate those genes, typical of the pig, capable of triggering rejection in the recipient patient. As early as last October, surgeons from the New York University Langone, led by Robert Montgomery, had connected a pig kidney, genetically modified, to a patient with a very serious renal malformation and artificially kept alive. After the surgery, the kidney began to function, with no signs of rejection: doctors monitored renal function for 54 hours before pulling the plug on the already brain-dead woman.
January 11, 2022 (change January 11, 2022 | 10:46)
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