Xenotransplants, of pig organs into humans, may be closer than I thought. A dramatic step was taken last Friday when a pig heart was successfully transplanted into a man who was still being kept alive by the heart yesterday when the NY Times reported it. Following the news story, I'll link to a recent summary of the increasing success of transplanting pig hearts into non-human primates. In the near term, the idea is that a pig heart might keep a patient alive until a human organ becomes available.
Here's the NY Times story:
In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig. The breakthrough may lead one day to new supplies of animal organs for transplant into human patients. By Roni Caryn Rabin
"A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.
"It is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,” said Dr. Bartley Griffith, the director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center, who performed the operation.
“It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before.”
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And here's a just-published paper that gives some background:
Shu, S., Ren, J. & Song, J. Cardiac xenotransplantation: a promising way to treat advanced heart failure. Heart Fail Rev 27, 71–91 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10741-020-09989-x
Abstract: Cardiac xenotransplantation (CXTx) might be a promising approach to bridge the gap between the supply and demand of a donor heart. The survival of cardiac xenograft has been significantly extended in pig-to-nonhuman primate (NHP) CXTx, with records of 195 days and 945 days for orthotropic and heterotopic CXTx, respectively. ...
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