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A man who got the 1st pig heart transplant has died after 2 months
The first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, two months after the groundbreaking experiment, the Maryland hospital that performed the surgery announced Wednesday.
David Bennett, 57, died Tuesday at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Doctors didn't give an exact cause of death, saying only that his condition had begun deteriorating several days earlier.
[...] Prior attempts at such transplants — or xenotransplantation — have failed largely because patients' bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. This time, the Maryland surgeons used a heart from a gene-edited pig: Scientists had modified the animal to remove pig genes that trigger the hyper-fast rejection and add human genes to help the body accept the organ.
At first the pig heart was functioning, and the Maryland hospital issued periodic updates that Bennett seemed to be slowly recovering. Last month, the hospital released video of him watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed while working with his physical therapist.
Bennett survived significantly longer with the gene-edited pig heart than one of the last milestones in xenotransplantation — when Baby Fae, a dying California infant, lived 21 days with a baboon's heart in 1984.
[...] One next question is whether scientists have learned enough from Bennett's experience and some other recent experiments with gene-edited pig organs to persuade the FDA to allow a clinical trial — possibly with an organ such as a kidney that isn't immediately fatal if it fails.
Previously: Surgeons Smash Records With Pig-to-Primate Organ Transplants
Surgeons Successfully Transplant Genetically Modified Pig Heart Into Human Patient
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 10 2022, @10:12PM (7 children)
Pig who donated heart to sick old man died immediately after the donation.
(and that's not a bad thing, the pigs we used for medical research were literally supplied by Oscar Meyer and had a more pleasant end-of-life experience than their bacon-in-progress siblings.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by stretch611 on Thursday March 10 2022, @11:21PM (5 children)
Get a free slab of pork ribs and bacon with every heart transplant... what could possibly be wrong with that?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 11 2022, @12:12AM (3 children)
I feel like the entire Tobacco industry takeover of the processed foods world was actually a next level conspiracy sponsored by the healthcare industry.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11 2022, @01:14PM
Birds fly, therefore the width of the human thumb is one three.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday March 11 2022, @06:00PM (1 child)
The US is the only country where health care is an industry ruled by greedy capitalists. Health care should not be an industry.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 11 2022, @06:46PM
As a 31 year employee of the U.S. heathcare industry (medical device companies - greedy capitalists one and all), I am obviously biased, but do see some benefit from the capitalist model driving the standard of care forward. Without greedy capitalists investing in new healthcare technologies, many would never be developed, and some of them do end up being highly beneficial to more than just the investors.
However, even from my perspective, the capitalist models employed in healthcare delivery: hospitals' administration, IMO AMA manufactured artificial scarcity of M.D.s elevating their "value" through lack of supply rather than increased quality of care, the farce of chargeable rates vs insurance vs private pay: more opaque and arbitrary than haggling in any old-world street market, pharma delivering products like oxycontin to market with a fig-leaf of patient benefit hiding a giant hard-on for profits, and many other aspects of care delivery are simply out of control - mostly driven by greed, multiplied by marketing, lobbying, barriers to access for competitive players, etc. If ever there were a system ripe for take-down, U.S. healthcare in the 2020s is it - well above AT&T in the 1980s, Standard Oil in 1911. Obviously, it's more complex than simple breakup of a monopoly, but the benefits going forward would be even more dramatic than those big monopoly breakups.
If healthcare isn't reigned in, sooner or later the U.S. is going to have to choose between it and military spending.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 11 2022, @02:15PM
Yeah I think you're right that they're working at cross-purposes. They should give him a heart from a leaner animal like a chicken or a fish.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11 2022, @05:20AM
It breaks my heart that you say this.