The center announced Monday evening that surgeons there successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig heart into a 57-year-old patient with terminal heart disease. The patient, David Bennett, was too sick to qualify for a human donor and had run out of other options.
In the decades-long effort to make xenotransplantation a reality, the new report differed from October’s in key respects. Most glaringly, the patient at NYU was already brain-dead. Doctors sutured a porcine kidney to the outside of her body and could only track whether the patient immediately rejected the foreign organ. As predicted by years of monkey experiments, she didn’t.
The new procedure may offer the first test of whether porcine organs, when bred with the right battery of genetic edits, can actually serve as a replacement or supplement to human organ donation and allow patients to live functional lives.
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The news comes as xenotransplantation, after years on the medical margin, appeared to be inching closer to reality, potentially offering an alternative to the hundreds of thousands of patients in the US and around the world waiting for organs. After a high-profile attempt to transplant a baboon heart into a baby with a congenital heart defect failed in 1983, researchers and several companies tried to use recombinant DNA techniques to make pigs with organs that humans can accept.
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The sad news is that they are using living pigs for this but hopefully in near future, they can create just "pig heart"in lab without actual pigs. I hope.
The good news is - now there is concrete example for the morons who eat bacon to understand and open their eyes to see how pigs are genetically, physically and emotionally close to sapiens.
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