NEW YORK – A team of doctors from the NYU Langone Health hospital (New York, USA) has successfully transplanted genetically modified pig hearts into two recently deceased people who remained on life support with ventilators, the center reported Tuesday.
Nader Moazami, the hospital’s director of heart transplant surgery, oversaw operations in June and July of this year in which the animals’ organs were integrated into two brain-dead donors and their operation was monitored for three days.
The experiment follows a similar one conducted last year at the University of Maryland, in which a genetically modified pig heart was implanted for the first time in a patient with terminal heart disease, but who died 49 days later as his condition deteriorated. condition.
According to the NYU Langone note, in these two xenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation) cases, no early signs of rejection were observed and the hearts functioned normally on standard post-transplant medication and without additional mechanical support.
The process followed a new protocol for infectious diseases that allowed to rule out the presence of a porcine virus (pCMV), while strict measures were also applied to avoid and monitor the potential zoonotic transmission of a porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV).
The director of the hospital’s Transplant Institute, Robert Montgomery, who was responsible for transplanting a modified pig’s kidney to a person who died late last year, said that the monitoring of porcine viruses incorporated into this process has been a key element of his success.
The pigs’ hearts were from the Revivicor biotech company and had ten genetic modifications to prevent organ rejection, abnormal growth in the body, and incompatibilities between animals and humans.
Montgomery said studies with recently deceased donors are essential to gathering the human-related data needed to advance a medical field that for decades, and until last year, had only experimented on primates.
The hospital said these successful xenotransplantations are a step toward developing a protocol to ensure an alternative supply of organs for people with fatal heart disease, just at a time of organ shortages in the United States.
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