Rest in peace
A patient with the heart of a genetically modified pig has died
Polina Loseva, N+1
David Bennett, the world's first recipient of a GM pig heart, died on March 8, the press service of the Medical Center at the University of Maryland reports. The cause of death has not yet been announced. In total, after the heart transplant, Bennett lasted a little more than two months — this is a record among recipients of pig hearts.
David Bennett ended up in the hospital in the fall of 2021 with an arrhythmia. Bennett did not meet the criteria for either a donor heart transplant or the installation of an artificial valve. His condition was so severe that doctors connected him to an ECMO device, which pumped blood through itself and saturated it with oxygen, working for both the heart and lungs at once. Then the doctors suggested that he try out an experimental method of treatment — heart transplantation from a GM pig.
Doctors have been trying to transplant organs from ordinary animals for a long time, but recipients of such organs quickly develop an acute immune response, and the body rejects the transplant. For example, in 1984, a newborn American woman had a baboon heart transplanted, but she died three weeks later.
To mitigate the rejection reaction, scientists have begun to derive lines of modified pigs whose cells carry fewer antigens unfamiliar to the human immune system. Doctors offered to check one of such developments to Bennett — having previously explained to him all the risks. The FDA approved this experimental operation on December 31, 2021.
Bennett agreed and received a heart from a pig created by Revivicor: ten different genes were modified in its genome. A few days after the operation, in mid-January 2022, the doctors reported that it was successful, and they did not notice any signs of rejection.
After that, Bennett was left in the hospital, where he underwent rehabilitation, communicated with his family and hoped for an early discharge home. Against the background of the success of doctors from Maryland, German biotechnologists announced that they would purposefully raise donor pigs for such operations. At the same time, there was a discussion in the media about how ethically the doctors acted: it turned out that in his youth Bennett was tried for causing serious damage to health — he attacked a man, and he remained paralyzed for the rest of his life.
On March 9, 2022, the Maryland Clinic announced that Bennett had passed away the day before. The cause of death was not disclosed, the doctors only noted that a few days before his condition began to deteriorate, and he only had to provide palliative care.
"He showed himself to be a brave and noble patient who fought to the end," wrote Bartley Griffith, who operated on Bennett. According to other employees of the University of Maryland, this example shows that such transplants are possible, and allows us to work on new clinical trials.
Earlier we talked about how a human was first transplanted with the skin of a GM pig. We also wrote about a similar experiment with a pig kidney, although it is difficult to call it a transplant: the organ was not sewn into the patient's body, besides, doctors have already pronounced her brain dead.
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