In a first-of-its-kind surgery, a 57-year-old patient with end-stage heart disease received a successful transplant of a genetically modified pig heart and remains well three days after the procedure. The operation was performed by specialists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine at the University’s Medical Center in the United States.
Organ transplantation has demonstrated, for the first time, that a genetically modified animal heart can function like a human heart without immediate rejection by the body.
According to the University of Maryland, the patient, David Bennett, will remain under monitoring for the next few weeks. Bennett had been ruled ineligible for a conventional heart transplant by doctors at the university and several other transplant centers who reviewed his medical records.
In an interview with CNN, cardiologist Roberto Kalil Filho, presenter of the program CNN Vital Signs and professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo (USP), stated that science has been working in the search for transplants between species for over forty years.
“This opens the way for various types of transplants, the so-called xenotransplants, not only for the heart, but also for various organs. Science is making great strides and the proof was this surgery. Chances are you will open the fan to various organs. With this, you will save millions of lives”, he said.
The expert explains that the lack of donors is one of the biggest challenges for heart transplants.
“The main problems with transplantation are not the techniques, the surgery is already conventional all over the world. Even medications to prevent rejection have been known for decades. The outcome of a heart transplant is very good. The big problem is the lack of donors many times. In Brazil, people wait for a heart transplant for years and end up dying before a donor appears,” he said.
According to Kalil, the success of the transplant operation between different species could revolutionize the treatment of patients with heart failure. “Heart transplantation is the final route, it is the last alternative for the patient’s survival. Heart failure means that the heart is very weak, that the only solution would be a transplant,” he said.
Reference: CNN Brasil
