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 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.
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.
Reviewed by Megan Craig, M.Sc.
Dr Philip Cardiff, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, has received a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant of €2 million for his 5-year project XenoSim. With the support of this award, Dr Cardiff will develop advanced computational techniques that can provide unprecedented insights into the cutting-edge realm of pig-to-human heart transplants
ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to help excellent scientists, who have 7-12 years’ experience after their PhDs, to pursue their most promising ideas. Read the full article from News Medical Life Sciences.
As part of the worldwide effort to facilitate a research and clinical pathway toward successful xenotransplantation -; the transplantation of living cells, tissues and organs from one species to another -; two Johns Hopkins Medicine surgeons, Kazuhiko Yamada, M.D., Ph.D., and Andrew Cameron, M.D., Ph.D., will receive a total of $21.4 million in funding over the next two years under two sponsored research agreements with biotechnology company United Therapeutics Corporation. The company focuses on developing novel pharmaceutical therapies and technologies that expand the availability of transplantable organs. Read more from News Medical Life Sciences.
Study demonstrates that a novel technique for regenerating donor lungs can increase the number of organs available for life-saving transplantation
NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — A novel method for supporting and recovering donor lungs outside the body shows potential to increase the number of organs available for transplant, according to a recent study published in The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation. Read the complete press release on Yahoo.com.