Doctors Transplant Pig Heart Into Dying Patient in First Experimental Surgery

For the first time in medical history, a patient in a Maryland hospital received a pig's heart in a last-effort heart transplant and is in stable condition three days after the procedure.

David Bennett, 57, said the day before his surgery that the transplant was going to be a "shot in the dark."

"It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it's a shot in the dark, but it's my last choice," he said in a comment provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The procedure, known in medical terms as xenotransplantation, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and classified with a "compassionate use" emergency authorization. Bennett's son told reporters that his father knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work, but he was ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option.

While it is too soon to tell if it will be completely successful, the highly experimental surgery could be a medical breakthrough, as doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center said the surgery demonstrated a possibility for genetically modified animal organs to function within the human body.

The pig heart had been gene-edited to remove the sugar that is responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection in its cells, AP News reported.

"If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering," said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university's animal-to-human transplant program.

Organ donations are in short supply in the U.S. and the list of patients in need of transplants consistently increases, pushing doctors and scientists to turn to animal organs for answers.

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the United States in 2021, a record high.

It is not the first animal-to-human transplant experiment, though. In 1984, a dying infant lived 21 days with a baboon heart, and researchers in New York discovered a way to temporarily use a pig's kidney in a human just last year.

However, Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center in New York, warned that the data gathered from this new development needs to be shared and processed before anyone can open up the option to more patients. The graphic below, provided by Statista, shows the current U.S. waiting times for various transplant surgeries.

Still, the procedure is the first step toward a widening of options for patients in need of organ transplants.

"I think you can characterize it as a watershed event," Dr. David Klassen, UNOS' chief medical officer, said.

Newsweek reached out to the University of Maryland Medical Center for comment.