BREAKING; In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a human in a last-ditch effort to save his life. A Maryland hospital says the patient is doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery.
“If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university’s animal-to-human transplant program.
The difference this time: The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection. Still, Klassen cautioned that it’s only a first tentative step into exploring whether this time around, xenotransplantation might finally work.
Just last September, researchers in New York performed an experiment suggesting these kinds of pigs might offer promise for animal-to-human transplants. Doctors temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a deceased human body and watched it begin to work.