The historic transplantation of a pig heart into a man was performed by surgeons of the United States. The decision to transplant the pig heart was the last effort to save the patient’s life and miraculously the man is doing really well three days after the highly experimental surgery he went through creating history.
It is still too soon to tell if the operation has worked really but the thirst of the scientific fraternity has been quenched when it comes to using animal organs for life-saving transplants such as this one. The surgery which was performed by doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center located in the United States has shown that a heart from an animal that has been genetically modified can work inside a human body without getting rejected instantly.
The patient, David Benett, aged 57 years old, professionally a handyman did not expect anything from the surgery as there was no way of knowing the transplant could work but this was his last shot at life. He was ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option but to take part in the historic surgery of transplanting a pig heart inside his body. He had said a day before the surgery that it was do or die, it was a shot in the dark but he wanted to live. David could breathe on his own on Monday while still being attached to a heart-lung machine to help his newly transplanted heart.
The upcoming few weeks will be very critical as David will recover from the surgery and he will be monitored by the doctors to see how his heart is faring. There is an acute shortage of organs donated by humans for transplants and scientists have been experimenting with alternate animal organ transplantation for decades now. Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university’s animal-to-human transplant program has aforesaid that if this surgery works well, there’ll be an endless supply of organs for people who are suffering all over the world.
This is the first instance when the surgery has worked so far, previous attempts at xenotransplantation had failed because the human body would reject the animal organ immediately. Only in 1984, a dying infant was able to live for 21 days with a baboon heart inside his body. This time the pig heart was obtained from a pig who had undergone genetic modification to eliminate sugar in its cells. This sugar was responsible for the hyper-fast organ rejection by the human body.
This is only a tentative step towards xenotransplantation and this surgery was allowed because the patient had no other option. The data gathered from this transplant surgery might help other patients around the world.
