David Bennett, the first man to receive a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig, died on Tuesday, only two months after the historic surgery went viral among experts and social media users.
Medical professionals did not immediately disclose the patient's cause of death and doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center did not reveal whether or not it was connected to any complications from the surgery. On Wednesday, the hospital released a statement that said the 57-year-old's health began deteriorating several days prior to his death.
Pig Heart Transplant
The hospital added that when doctors observed the patient was not going to recover from his condition, they gave him compassionate palliative care. They said that Bennett was able to communicate with his family during the final fours of his life.
David Bennett, Jr., the patient's son, released a statement through the hospital where he expressed his gratitude to the doctors who took care of his father. He added that the exhaustive efforts and energy of medical professionals combined with his dad's insatiable will to live, gave hope to his family during their struggles, as per NBC News.
The tragic loss comes as doctors, for decades, have sought to use animal organs to save lives in transplant surgeries. Bennett, who worked as a handyman in Hagerstown, Maryland, was one candidate in the experimental procedure. Without getting the new heart, the patient faces certain death because he was ineligible for a human heart transplant.
Many previous attempts of similar transplants, which are called xenotransplantation, have seen failure after failure, largely due to the patients' bodies rejecting the animal organs. But the case with Bennett was different because scientists had modified the animal to remove pig genes that trigger the hyper-fast rejection and added human genes to help the patient's body accept the foreign organ.
Experimental Procedures
According to the Associated Press, the modified pig's heart was functioning properly in the beginning and the Maryland hospital issued periodic updates that Bennett's health was slowly getting better. In a video last month, the hospital showed the patient watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed while working with his physical therapist.
The doctor who performed the transplant on Bennett, surgeon Bartley Griffith, said that after the surgery, the patient proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought for his life. The medical professional previously said that the procedure would allow the world to take "one step closer" to addressing the organ shortage crisis.
Currently, around 17 people die every single day just in the United States while waiting for an organ transplant and more than 100,000 are reportedly on the waiting list. The use of animal organs in human transplants has been studied for a long time. In October last year, a pig's kidney was successfully transplanted into a human, New York surgeons said. At the time, the procedure was considered to be the most advanced experiment in the field but it was noted that the recipient was brain dead with no hope of recovery, BBC reported.
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