In a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs, Maryland doctors have saved a 57-year-old patient with life-threatening heart disease giving him a heart from a genetically modified pig.
After realizing this was his final shot at surviving terminal heart disease due to his ineligibility to receive a human heart, David Bennett, who is reportedly in stable condition just days after he received an experimental pig heart transplant, consented to the procedure.
Before the eight-hour surgery took place in Baltimore on Friday, Bennett said he faced the choice of dying or doing this transplant, which was shot in the dark, but he opted for it since wanted to live.
University of Maryland School of Medicine, whose scientists performed the procedure, pointed in its statement that this experimental organ transplant demonstrated for the first time that a genetically-modified animal heart can function as a human heart without immediate rejection by the body.
Bartley P. Griffith, the doctor who transplanted the pig heart into Bennett, pointed that this breakthrough surgery may have brought mankind one huge step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis.
According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that coordinates the United States’ organ procurement efforts, noted that some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ last year and that there are not enough donor human hearts for the long list of recipients who need one.
While Bennett breathing on his own just three days after the operation and it appears that the experiment has been successful, he will continue to be monitored for several weeks and will remain connected to a heart-lung machine.
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