The second person to receive a pig heart transplant has died, nearly six weeks after the highly experimental surgery, Maryland doctors who handled the case announced.
Lawrence Faucette, 58, was suffering from heart failure and was not eligible for a traditional heart transplant when he received the genetically modified pig heart on September 20.
According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the heart appeared healthy for the first month, but began to show signs of rejection in recent days. Faucette died Monday.
In a statement released by the hospital, Faucette's wife, Ann, said her husband “knew that his time with us was short and that this was his last chance to do something for others. He never imagined he would survive this long."
Last year, the Maryland team performed the first heart transplant from a genetically altered pig to another dying man. David Bennett survived two months before that heart failed, for unknown reasons.
"It is not completely clear, although signs of a porcine virus were later found inside the organ. Lessons from that first experiment led to changes, including better virus testing, before the second attempt.
"Mr. Faucette's dying wish was that we make the most of what we have learned from our experience," Dr. Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who led the transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Center, said in a statement.
Attempts at organ transplants from animals to humans, called xenotransplantations, have failed for decades as people's immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue.
Now scientists are trying again to use genetically modified pigs to make their organs more like humans. Faucette, a Navy veteran and father of two, had been turned down for a traditional heart transplant due to other health issues when he arrived at the Maryland hospital, running out of options and expressing a desire to spend a little more time with his family. .
In mid-October, the hospital said Faucette had been able to stand and posted a video showing him working hard in physical therapy to regain the strength needed to attempt to walk.
Head of cardiac xenotransplantation, Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, said the team will look at what happened to the heart as they continue to study the pigs' organs.
Many scientists hope that one day xenotransplants can make up for the enormous shortage of human organ donations. More than 100,000 people are on the national list for a transplant, most waiting for kidneys, and thousands will die waiting.
A handful of scientific teams have tested pig kidneys and hearts in monkeys and in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough for the Food and Drug Administration to allow formal studies of xenotransplantation.
