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.
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.
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.
A recent study to be presented at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2022* revealed unexpected changes in the electrical conduction system of the first genetically-modified porcine-to-human heart xenotransplant.
Xenotransplantation is the procedure of transplantation/implantation into a human of organs from non-human animal sources. Read more in News Medical Life Sciences.
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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Playing by the strict rules of the FDA, xenotransplant researchers are itching to apply the lessons learned from this year’s historic case of cardiac surgery in their quest to move the transplant field forward amid a strained supply of donor organs.
In the landmark case, the first person to undergo a pig heart xenotransplant, David Bennett, age 57, had been denied a traditional human heart transplant from several programs before he ultimately agreed to the experimental surgery. The FDA green-lit the xenotransplant, and Bennett was kept alive for 60 days before succumbing to graft failure and sudden diastolic failure without evidence of traditional allograft rejection.
Read the full story in MedPage Today.
Surgeons at New York University (NYU) transplanted two genetically modified pig hearts into individuals who were brain dead, and saw good cardiac function, with no signs of immediate rejection during a 72-hour observation period.
The xenotransplants were conducted on June 16 and July 6 at NYU Langone Tisch Hospital in New York City, and had 10 genetic modifications aimed at preventing rejection and stopping abnormal organ growth. Read more in MedPage Today.
A team at NYU Langone Health successfully transplanted two genetically engineered pig hearts into recently deceased humans in June and July, part of an effort to create a xenotransplantation protocol for people with heart disease.
The two xenotransplants were performed June 16 and July 6 with two recently deceased donors maintained on ventilator support at NYU Langone’s Tisch Hospital. The team of surgeons then monitored heart function for 3 days for each donor.
Read the full article in Healio.
On April 13, CareDx hosted a webinar to explore the future of xenotransplantation. Panelists included Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and chair of the hospital’s Department of Surgery. Dr. Montgomery led the team that did the first human xenotransplant using a pig kidney. He spent 30 years at Johns Hopkins and moved to NYU Langone in 2016. Two years later, he was the recipient of a heart transplant, which gave him a fresh and unique perspective on the transplant journey.
Dr. Montgomery was joined by Michael Curtis, president and head of Research and Development at eGenesis Inc., which is working to scale xenotransplantation to help more patients, and Jim Gleason, National President of Transplant Recipients International Organization (TRIO), which serves as the voice of the transplant patient. Gleason is also a heart transplant recipient who is particularly excited about xenotransplantation because he believes it addresses what he called “the #1 unmet need in transplantation: the organ supply.”
This article is adapted from our webinar conversation, edited only for clarity and length. Read the full story on CareDx.com.
On the heels of some important “firsts” this past year, xenotransplantation — grafting animal organs into humans — is on the cusp of crossing over into new territory: human trials.
In January, University of Maryland surgeons transplanted a pig heart into a 57-year-old man, who survived two months. And last fall, New York University doctors implanted pig kidneys into recently deceased individuals to show there wouldn’t be immediate rejection of the organs. As exciting as these procedures were for researchers who have been trying to make xenotransplantation a reality, they highlighted the slow pace of clinical development, which has been stalled in primate studies for decades. Read more.