The second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig has died, nearly six weeks after the highly experimental surgery, his Maryland doctors announced Tuesday.
Lawrence Faucette, 58, was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant when he received the genetically modified pig heart on Sept. 20. Read the full article in CBS News.
Advances are increasing the supply of organs. But this isn’t enough. Enter the genetically modified donor pig
By Tanya Lewis
Robert Montgomery walked deliberately down the hospital hallway carrying a stainless-steel bowl containing a living human kidney resting on a bed of ice. Minutes earlier the organ had been in one man’s body. It was about to be implanted into another man to keep him alive.
It was about 11 A.M. on a Monday this past spring. I followed Montgomery, an abdominal transplant surgeon and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, into an operating room where 49-year-old John Primavera was waiting to receive the precious kidney.
Read the full article in Scientific American.
By Eric Lagatta
As he works hard to recover, Lawrence Faucette maintains his dream of soon returning home one month after he became the second person to receive the transplanted heart of a pig.
Though highly-experimental, the procedure was seemingly the 58-year-old man’s last hope to extend his life after health problems made him ineligible for a traditional heart transplant. But so far, his doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine say Faucette’s new heart is functioning well and showing no signs of rejection. Read the full story in USA Today.
By Mark E. Neumann
In a recent editorial, Beatrice Concepcion, MD, wrote despite some challenges, transplantation “remains the treatment of choice for most patients with advanced kidney disease,” offering a better quality of life compared with dialysis.
Administrators of the Medicare End-Stage Renal Disease Program see kidney transplants as more cost effective compared with dialysis and encourage the option through demonstrations that are part of the Advancing American Kidney Health initiative.
Read the full article in Healio.
By Karen Weintraub
A Massachusetts-based company announced Wednesday that it has kept a monkey alive for two years with a pig kidney, the longest an animal has survived with an organ from a different animal. The work marks another substantial step toward solving the human organ shortage by using animals as donors.
The pig donor is born with 69 gene edits, by far the largest number used in an experiment of this kind, performed to try to reduce the risk of rejection, improve survival and eliminate any chance of a pig virus passing to the organ’s new host. Read the article in USA Today.
Analysis by Lisa Jarvis | Bloomberg
There’s long been a gap between the relatively small number of organs available for transplant and the long waiting lists of potential recipients. This week, the world got a little closer to a future in which pigs — yes, pigs — could narrow that gap.
A new study, published in Nature, showed that a monkey lived for two years after receiving a gene-edited pig kidney. Read the full article in The Washington Post.
By Jessica Albert
BALTIMORE – Doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine performed its second groundbreaking transplant of a genetically modified pig heart.
The transplant was given to a man from Frederick who had been rejected from all other transplant centers because of pre-existing conditions.
We are told the patient is breathing on his own and his new heart is working without any assistance. Read the full story from WJZ CBS News Baltimore.
By Tanya Lewis, Jeffrey DelViscio, Alexis Lim
Xenotransplants could help to solve the organ transplant crisis—if researchers can get the science right.
Tanya Lewis: I’m standing on the rooftop of NYU Langone Health, a hospital in midtown Manhattan, scanning the sky over the East River for a helicopter. It’s New York City, so there are tons of helicopters, but I’m looking for a specific one. Read the full transcript or listen to the interview in Scientific American.
By Karen Weintraub
Doctors in New York have managed to keep a brain-dead man in a state of sort of suspended animation for more than a month after removing his kidneys and replacing them with one from a pig.
A ventilator has kept 57-year-old Maurice Miller’s heart beating and other organs functioning while the pig kidney produces urine and other normal byproducts. Read the full story in USA Today.
By Deborah Kotz
A new study published in The Lancet on June 29 has revealed the most extensive analysis to date on what led to the eventual heart failure in the world’s first successful transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into a human patient. This groundbreaking procedure was conducted by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) physician-scientists in January 2022 and marked an important milestone for medical science. Read the full article in UMB News.